Deploy VCF 4.5 Lab on AMD Ryzen – Part 2

In first part, we had seen how to setup base VMs and Infrastructure to prepare for VCF Bringup. In 2nd part, I am going to cover SDDC Bringup process and issues I have encountered during deployment. Link to first part is down below. It also has a sample JSON file, which I have used to cut on comonents to save on precious compute and storage in a lab environment.

Let’s start deploying VCF 4.5 on our lab environment.

Deploy Cloud Builder

Cloud Builder is required to start initiation of VCF management domain. This OVA can be downloaded from CustomerConnect VMware download and deploy either via ESXi host or vCenter server.

Few tips about Cloud Builder in lab

I tried deploying Cloud Builder directly on VMware Workstation but it was unstable. Bringup services were failing intermittently during bringup process.
Deploy a new ESXi host with bare minimum requirements – 4 vCPU and 8 GB RAM and then deploy Cloud Builder on ESXi host. This is much stable as compare to deploying directly on Workstation.
Ensure all different network setup are reachable from Cloud Builder.

SDDC bringup process

Select VMware Cloud Platform

Select, I have reviewed the pre-requisties to confirm all pre-requisites have been completed. Ensure all basic pre-reqs have been done as explained in previous part 1.

Provide the custom JSON file prepared using Upload option and click Next.

This will start validation checks which perform a variety of checks such as NTP, vMotion, TEP checks etc.

If there are any checks get failed. Check the error message, fix the issue and then Retry.

Once all Validations checks are successful, Click Next and select Deploy SDDC. If there is warning for NTP on Cloud Builder, it can be safely ignored.

During deployment, it will setup vCenter, NSX-T Manager and SDDC Manager. Its the standard deployment process which will be followed except setting up AVN which will be covered in Part 3.

Once Deployment is finished, all components will be online and click Finish which will launch SDDC Manager.

Congratulations! You have successfully deployed VCF 4.5 in lab.

few tips about SDDC Bring-up

Use 64 GB of RAM for first two ESXi host as NSX-T Manager deployed uses memory reservation which will fail the power on operation for NSX-T Manager if 32 GB RAM is configured on ESXi host.
During deployement, I observed each ESXi host consumed around 11 GB of RAM to cover vSAN overhead. So keep 32 GB of RAM on rest of two ESXi host else NSX-T VIB installation tends to fail which in turn fail the deployement.

conclusion

This was easy, isn’t. Well the challenge just started. Next piece is deploying Edge Cluster on our Management domain and we need to tweak Edge VMs for successful deployment but that’s for another day, another blog. Logging off for now and hold tight for next part. See you soon.