Getting started with VCF Part 5 – Commission Hosts

At this stage, we’ve done quite a number of tasks related to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Our management domain is up and running, and we also have the vRealize Suite of products deployed (vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Operations Manager, and of course vRealize Automation). Our next step is to commission some new ESXi hosts so we can create our very first VI Workload Domain (WLD) which we can start using for production purposes. This post will look at the steps involved in commissioning the hosts. Note that in this example, I am going to commission ESXi…

Getting started with VCF Part 4 – vRA Deployment

After taking care of all of the prerequisite steps highlighted in my VMware Cloud Foundation Part 3 post, we are now ready to deploy vRealize Automation (vRA) via vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLM) in the VCF SDDC Manager. This will be a relatively shorter “show and tell” post, which will take you through the deployment steps. It will also show you how you can monitor the progress of the vRA deployment. The complete deployment does take some time since there are quite a number of virtual appliances and virtual machines that need to be rolled out for vRA (11 in…

Getting started with VCF Part 3 – vRealize Automation Prerequisites

Continuing on my journey of ramping up on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), my next step is to go through the deployment of vRealize Automation. This is again done via the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLM). We’ve already seen how to deploy out vRealize Operations through vRSLM in part 2. And in part 1, we saw the initial VCF management domain deployment. In this post we will take a detailed look at what needs to be put in place in order to be able to deploy vRealize Automation (vRA). Now, there are quite a number of prerequisites needed before we can…

Getting started with VCF Part 2 – vRealize Suite

Following on from my first post on getting started with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the next thing that you will probably want to do is configure the vRealize Suite in SDDC Manager. Now, as part of the initial VCF deployment, vRealize Login Insight is already deployed.  Therefore in this step, we will deploy two components – the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager and vRealize Operations. There are two pieces of information that we will need before we start. The first of these is the ‘Bill of Materials’ to tell us which versions of software are required for our particular release of…

Getting started with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)

After returning from the holidays, one of the items at the top of my agenda was to become more familiarity with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those of you who are not familiar with VCF, it is basically the ‘easy button’ for deploying the full vSphere stack of products, including virtual storage (vSAN), virtual networking (NSX) as well as monitoring and logging products such as vRealize Operation, vRealize Log Insight and so on. However, it is so much more, because once VCF is stood up, it becomes the building block for the deployment of what could be termed the application…