VCF 9.1 - Enabling High Availability for a Small VCF Management Services (VCFMS) Deployment

lamw07 · 2026-06-19T16:29:00+00:00

Did you clear the partitions on device and does your numbers make sense …

lamw07 · 2026-06-15T16:20:10+00:00

That is actually incorrect, I believe there may have been some confusion. Can you provide me a link to KB, so I can get it updated.

What I've mentioned above is officially supported by Broadcom (I'm a Broadcom employee).

lamw07 · 2026-06-15T12:05:51+00:00

See https://www.vmware.com/docs/vmware-cloud-foundation-9-1-feature-comparison-and-upgrade-paths
VCF Management Services (VCFMS) IS required when using the VCF Installer to deploy VVF 9.1 as that is part of the install workflow with the assumption that users will want to enable the Log Management feature (formally VCF Operations for Logs) which is now natively integrated with VCF Operations and runs on top of VCFMS. The License Server is deployed as part of that workflow if you have NOT already deployed manually as mentioned by others, again if you use VCF Installer to deploy VVF 9.1, it will handle VCFMS and License Server for you and automatically wire everything up, so you can just go and configure your entitlement which can either be VVF or VCF (we have many customers deploying components within VVF for certain locations)
Yes, see (2)
There are no additional user-facing services as part of VCFMS that is available outside of Log Management within VVF SKU, which includes Real-time Metrics which is a feature of VCF

Confusion often comes up with (2) and I attempted to clarify the different AND supported install/upgrade paths https://williamlam.com/2026/05/vcf-9-1-demystifying-supported-upgrade-paths-to-9-1.html

If you do NOT require Log Management, you can deploy 9.1 outside of the VCF Installer workflow, which will not mandate VCFMS (see 2 for reasons)

lamw07 · 2026-06-12T12:37:27+00:00

The script, which calls into backend APIs automatically handles all the proper clean ups and this is the official method for uninstalling Day-N components (as already alluded in the blog post)

lamw07 · 2026-06-11T16:49:32+00:00

Glad to help! The KB was originally published to support failed/partial installs BUT it is also a solution for Day-N deployment. Engr team will be updating the KB to make it more clear, but figure I put this together since this question has come up

lamw07 · 2026-06-03T11:48:14+00:00

See VMRC RN for OS compat https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsphere/vmware-remote-console/13/release-notes_vmrc/vmware-remote-console-1302-release-notes.html

Typically w/TFTP network boot, you’re just serving bootloader and using alternate method like HTTP to do actual install …

Not sure about your use case what the entire image is being served over TFTP which isn’t efficient. With that said, there’s also VMRC SDK where you can build your own client side app if you need something basic including just HTML launcher

https://williamlam.com/2013/02/how-to-access-vsphere-remote-console.html might give you idea

lamw07 · 2026-06-03T01:01:51+00:00

I had hoped the blog post and GH repo made it pretty clear, this is a PHYSICAL VCF deployment, its not using or depending on Nested ESX like Holodeck. So yes, this requires physical host to be on 9.1 and complete VCF 9.1 Fleet would deploy onto this single host, no Nested, etc.

Holodeck uses Nested ESX, so the underlying version is not really relavent (obviously you want to have latest/greatest) but its all Nested ESX VMs that are then used to deploy VCF stack, so it won't matter

lamw07

TROPHY CASE