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One of my pet projects that I have been looking into is to easily deploy the required infrastructure, using Nested ESXi of course, to be able to quickly standup a “basic” VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment. There are a couple of solutions that currently exists in the community that can help take a user from having no infrastructure to setting up all the components required to standup a complete functional VCF envionmrent, similar to that of a physical VCF deployment. As such, the pre-requisites for using those tools was a bit more than what I was looking for and can also feel overwhelming for a new user. I certainly fell into that category while looking at some of the existing tools.
Ultimately, my use case was slightly different and I also did not need all the bells and whistles such as configuring Application Virtual Networks (VCN) and this also meant that I could dramatically simplify the deployment. For example, instead of deploying the ESXi hosts from scratch, I could simply take advantage of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and use that as a starting point. For those familiar with my various PowerCLI automated lab deployment scripts, I have created a simliar experience for VCF that will deploy a set of Nested ESXi Appliances along with the VMware Cloud Builder appliance, which is then used to deploy VCF on top of the Nested ESXi VMs. To ensure the user experience is as painless and simple, I also use the customer supplied configurations within the script to automagically generate the VCF configuration JSON file that can then be uploaded directly to the Cloud Builder appliance to begin the VCF deployment once the initial infrastructure has been deployed by the automation script.
Note: Although AVN and the respective NSX-T configuration is not in scope for the automation script, it is definitely possible to use a solution like VyOS or pfSense and using techniques like the following to automate the additional infrastructure to enable the ability to deploy a complete VCF environment. I will leave this as as fun and interesting learning exercise for the reader.
You can find the complete details on VCF Automation script and how to use it at the following Github Repo: https://github.com/lamw/vcf-automated-lab-deployment
Here is an example of running the script which took about 13 minutes on my environment to deploy requirement components for Cloud Builder to begin VCF deployment.
After the script has completed, you should see a vApp that contains the following 5 VMs and you can now connect to the Cloud Builder UI.
From here, you will upload the auto-generated vcf-config.json configuration file from the automation script and just sit back and watch your VCF environment get built.
This process will vary based on your underlying hardware and for my setup, it took a little over 1.5 hours to complete. Once completed, you will have vCenter Server, vSAN and NSX-T fully configured along with SDDC Manager which will be accessible by using the vSphere credentials that you had defined in the automation script as shown in the screenshot below.
