Blog Date: December 2025

In my previous post, I walked through the process of getting the VMUG Advantage token configured in the Cloud Foundation Installer, to establish the connection to the online depot and download the VCF bits, HERE. This post assumes those bits have all been downloaded successfully.

Before continuing with your VCF 9 home lab deployment, or even a production deployment, be sure to check out this post HERE, where I cover the updated password requirements for VCF, and how missing those requirements will cause the deployment to fail.

For a VCF 9 home lab running on hardware that’s not part of the VMware HCL, it will be necessary to bypass the vSAN ESA precheck during VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment using the Cloud Foundation Installer. If compatible vSAN ESA hardware is not available in your home lab, the deployment fails during the HCL validation phase. To bypass this, log in to the VCF Installer and append the following configuration parameter to the following /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties file:

echo "vsan.esa.sddc.managed.disk.claim=true" >> /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties

Next, you’ll either need to restart the the appliance, or you can just restart the service with the following:

systemctl restart domainmanager   

Time to start the VCF 9 deployment.

I’ve been deploying VCF for customers since the 2.X days, so I have mixed feelings about this new wizard. However, I must say I do enjoy not having to fill in multiple deployment workbooks. I am deploying a greenfield VCF home lab, so I do not have existing components

I elected to do a simple deployment for my homelab. I did notice through testing that the Installer will hallucinate if one of the NTP servers is not reachable. Later on during the pre-check validations, I saw error messages stating the NTP value was null. Probably my favorite was when it hallucinated NTP values that I did not configure, but said that it couldn’t reach them (duh). My only indication of the actual problem was that the pre-check failed when it couldn’t validate the ESX hosts connection to the second NTP and DNS server. I wonder how much vibe coding the VCF devs were doing that day?

I hadn’t deployed my second domain controller yet that I would also use as my second NTP source, and was hoping that I could set it during the Core VCF deployment, and deploy the server after. I ended up just deleting the second DNS and NTP server address in the Installer. I’ll just add it later. I left them configured on the ESX hosts.

Deployment for VCF (Aria) Operations and Fleet Management Appliance (Aria Suite LCM)

I elected to not deploy VCF (Aria) Automation. I’ll deploy this after.

I deployed my management vCenter using the medium size to avoid the smaller appliances performance issues.

Even though the “simple deployment” was chosen, you are still required to define a Virtual IP for NSX.

Out of all the VMware home labs I have built, this is my first using vSAN, but I wanted to try out ESA. In the past I avoided vSAN just because in certain situations it made host maintenance painful.

I’ve got my 4 MINISFORUM MS-A2 hosts added.

I elected to keep my deployment simple in my home lab, and have my management VMs share the same network as my ESX hosts.

I chose the Default virtual distributed switch config

If you remember my previous post HERE, I talked about what will happen on this screen if you did not use a 15 character password for the local user (admin/Administrator).

As expected, the pre-check validation returned a WARNING on the vSAN ESX Disks Eligibility for not being on the HCL. This needs to be Acknowledged before the [DEPLOY] button becomes available.

I kicked off the VCF 9 deployment in my home lab at roughly 5:03pm. The deployment finished about 7 hours later (12:23AM to be exact). Honestly, it was the NSX OVA deployment that took roughly 6 hours to complete. The VCF Fleet Manager, VCF Operations, and VCF Ops collector deployed around an hour I believe.

In my next blog, I’ll run through getting VCF Operations connected to the Broadcom Cloud Services portal to activate my licenses in my home lab.