VMware Cloud Foundation and vSAN ESA (no internet connection)

I was doing at installation of VMware Cloud Foundation at a customer.

This installation does not have any internet connection, Which is something that I see as a growing requirement for VMware Infrastructure at customer.

This installation was with VMware Cloud foundation 5.1, and customer had purchased some vSAN ESA Ready nodes for the installation so everything looked good. We prepared the installation configuration Excel spreadsheet with VMware vSAN ESA and using “image” configuration and not “baseline”, as the later is not supported.

The bring-up started fine, but after some time if failed and in the log file on the Cloud Builder i found some lines that indicated that there was a problem configuring the Cluster in the vCenter with vLCM image.

I could not find any information about this, but after talking to some people at VMware/Broadcom they informed me that this is a known problem, the usage of “Cluster Image” requires internet connection during bring-up.

There was a workaround to set the Cluster to “Baseline” that will bring-up the VCF management domain, and afterwards you can change this to Cluster “Image”, but this is not supported. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/93220

Another solution is to do the installation as VMware vSAN OSA.

Hope Broadcom/VMware will do better testing, that is also isolated, as I see this is a requirement from more and more customers.