Prepare ESXi Hosts for VMware Cloud Foundation

Before you can begin the process of deploying VMware Cloud Foundation you must prepare the ESXi hosts that will form the management domain. To create a new VI workload domain, you must also prepare the ESXi hosts in advance.

The management domain requires a minimum of four ESXi hosts. VI workload domain, you must prepare a minimum of three ESXi hosts.

Note: If you are preparing ESXi hosts for a vSphere cluster using NFS, VMFS on FC, or vVols as principal storage, and the hosts will be added to a VI workload domain using vSphere Lifecycle Manager images as the update method, then only two hosts are required.

Preparing the ESXi hosts involves installing the correct version of ESXi and performing some basic configuration tasks. VMware Cloud Foundation supports two methods for preparing these ESXi hosts, either interactively or through the use of the VMware Imaging Appliance service (VIA) which is bundled within VMware Cloud Builder.

For the supported ESXi version, see the Bill of Materials (BOM) section of the VMware Cloud Foundation Release Notes.

Important: If you are preparing hosts for a VI workload domain where the ESXi hosts have been async patched to a later version of ESXi than the version listed in the BOM, the new hosts must use the later version of ESXi.