Building a Nested VCF 4.1 Lab

In this blog post I will try to show how we can build nested VCF 4.1 lab!

My Physical Server specs

• Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node
• 2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6140 CPU @ 2.30GHz
• 384 GB RAM

Physical Networking Requirements

• Set vSwitch MTU on your lab host to 9000
• Create a new port group on the vSwitch for the nested VMs and change VLAN to 4095 to allow for VLAN trunking and ensure Promiscuous Mode, MAC Address Changes & Forged Transmits are all set to Accept.

VCF Jump Server Requirements

• I am using Windows Server 2019 as DNS and NTP.
• PowerShell 5.1+ => check that using > $PSVersionTable.PSVersion

• PowerCLI 11.3+ => run this PowerShell command as admin <Install-Module -name VMware.PowerCLI>
• OVFTool 4.3+ => OVFTool download link
• Assign 2 vNICs to the Jump server 1 for local network & 1 for VCF-PG to reach the VCF subnet.

• Configure the vNIC VLAN ID to 10 (adapter type should be VMXNET3 )
• Disable Windows Firewall as recommended.

Using the VCF Lab Constructor- Manual Mode

In my environment I will use my own IPs, so I am going to use VLC in manual mode

1. VLC Download Link
2. VMware Cloud Builder 4.1.0 => download it from https://myvmware.com
3. I am using vyos as virtual router to setup BGP thanks @Datareload
4. Edit the JSON file with ESXI’s IP, DNS, NTP and don’t forget the Licenses required for VCF 😀
5. Fill the required info into VLC PowerShell GUI
6. Set Cloud Builder IP then click Validate hit Construct to begin the deployment 😀

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