Creating a vSphere Lifecycle Manager Image in VMware Cloud Foundation

A vSphere Lifecycle Manager image must be made available in VMware Cloud Foundation before it can be applied to a cluster when creating a VI workload domain or adding a vSphere cluster. You can either extract the vSphere Lifecycle Manager image from an existing vSphere Lifecycle Manager enabled workload domain cluster or import a vSphere Lifecycle Manager image that has been created and exported from an external vCenter Server.

A vSphere Lifecycle Manager image can be customized when it is applied to a vSphere cluster in VMware Cloud Foundation. For example, say your vSphere Lifecycle Manager image included only the base ESXi image. When you use this vSphere Lifecycle Manager image to create a VI workload domain, NSX components are added to the default cluster during the VI workload domain creation. You may also add vendor-adds, components, or firmware to the VI workload domain cluster. You can now extract the updated image from this cluster and reuse it for other similar clusters in this VI workload domain or in other VI workload domains.