You must meet the hardware, software, and other requirements listed in this section before you can start the Delivery and Acceptance (DA) process.

The Delivery and Acceptance process verifies that all VMware and custom partner pipelines run successfully against the servers to be used for the program. There are two stages as part of this process, Stage-1 and Stage-2.

The requirements listed below are the minimum requirements which you must provide to enable VMware to complete the 2 stage process for the VCPS program.

Requirement Details Notes
2 VMs (per stage)
  • Hardware Requirements:
    • vCPU - 8
    • RAM - 16 GB
    • OS Disk - 100 GB
    • HDD - 500 GB (Thin provisioned)
  • Software Requirements:
    • Guest OS. CentOS 7 and above.
    • Software Packages. You must install specific software packages on the VMs used in Stage-1 and Stage-2 testing. See the relevant sections for more information.
  • Connectivity Requirements:
    • Network Connectivity to manage VLANs of ESX hosts.
    • Internet Connectivity is required to access VMware repository and to install additional software.
    • SSH enabled for root user.
    • Access to the ESXi Management VLAN and the Management VM VLAN.
External Services
  • DNS, minimum 2
  • NTP, minimum 2
  • AD, optional
Network Underlay
The SDDC deployed during Delivery and Acceptance must be deployed on a network underlay that meets the following requirements:
  • 8 VLANs used to separate traffic types
  • 8 subnets mapped to 1 to1 VLANs
  • Ability to trunk VLANs to the ESX NICs
  • Support for full L2 protocols
 Additional VMware services can require additional VLANs.
8 ESXi Hosts

The ESXi hosts are the subject of the Delivery and Acceptance (DA) process. The pipelines will execute against these hosts.

Within a cluster, the hosts must have identical hardware profiles.

See the vSAN documentation for the minimum configuration that is required for the vSAN ready nodes.
Note: If a provider has multiple server hardware bill of materials (BOM), Stage-1 and Stage-2 processes must be run against each server models in the fleet for delivery and acceptance.
ESXi hosts have to be provided as a "configuration target" for the Stage-1 and Stage 2 VMs.
  • 4 for SDDC bring-up
  • 1 for Add Host testing
  • 3 for Add Cluster testing
Note:

The minimum requirement for validation is 8 ESXi hosts. With this minimum, Stage-1 and Stage-2 share the same hosts but run independently in a serial fashion with a host cleanup run between stages.

SDDC Input Spec File

The spec file must contain the information about the following:

  • VMware license keys
  • Hosts
  • Networks
  • vCenter
  • NSX
  • HCX Cloud
  • External service settings to use (DNS, NTP, and so on).
 The spec file is used to make a REST API call to the LCM Controller Service to initiate bring-up and to certify the test environment. See the JSON Specification file for an example.
Golden Repository
  • You must define and maintain this destination to hold the Golden bits. The bits are the output of the 2 stage Delivery and Acceptance process.
  • You are responsible to push the Golden bits that pass Stage-2 testing to this repository.
  • New SDDC deployments and patches or upgrades of existing SDDCs use the bits from the Golden Repository.
Pipelines or Binaries If you create any pipelines or binaries, you must maintain it in your source control systems and are responsible to populate them into the provisioning VM.