You complete the necessary procedures to prepare your environment for converting or importing an existing vSphere environment to VMware Cloud Foundaiton and then validate the environment after the process is complete.

Convert to a Management Domain
Follow this procedure if your environment does not have SDDC Manager deployed and you want to convert an existing vSphere environment to the VMware Cloud Foundation management domain.

Step

Task Name Additional Info
1 Copy the VCF Import Tool to the Target vCenter Appliance

2

Run a Precheck on the Target vCenter Before Conversion

The precheck determines if the environment can be converted to the management domain

3

Remove the VCF Import Tool from vCenter.

The convert operation is run from SDDC Manager, once deployed.

4 Deploy the SDDC Manager Appliance on the Target vCenter

5

Generate an NSX Deployment Specification for Converting or Importing Existing vSphere Environments

6

Upload the Required Software to the SDDC Manager Appliance

7

Run a Detailed Check on the Target vCenter Before Conversion or Import

8

Convert or Import the vSphere Environment into the SDDC Manager Inventory

The workload domain will be marked type: MGMT

9

Add Licenses for Converted or Imported Workload Domains in SDDC Manager

10

Validate a Converted Management Domain or Imported VI Workload Domain
If you make changes to an imported or converted environment using the vSphere client, you can use the sync workflow in the VCF Import Tool to manually update the SDDC Manager inventory with any out-of-band changes applied from vCenter Server. See Manage Workload Domain Configuration Drift Between vCenter Server and SDDC Manager.
Import as a VI Workload Domain

Follow this procedure if your environment already has SDDC Manager deployed and you want to import an existing vSphere environment as a VI workload domain.

You can convert/import up to a combined total of 24 workload domains.