Its been a while since I have had time to complete the many blogs that I have started but then not completed. I have been snowed under with customers and training to attempt Everest Base Camp this year. But it was a series of conversations with one of my customers that kicked me into gear to create the series that I am writing now.

You would have been living under a rock if you did not know about the guiding hand we supply in helping customers with on their journey towards VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) in version 9. This will be great for most customers, but some will still have a requirement to either stay on, or have pockets of VVF (VMware vSphere Foundation) in their environments. Now if you look out there the web is overflowing with articles on VCF, but there are almost none on VVF. The documentation that is available with the version 9 is the most detailed and comprehensive I have seen in all my years working with VMware. However there is now no longer a separate branch for VVF compared to VVF and they are now all part of the same 800 plus page set of documents, this can make it difficult and confusing to pull out VVF specific information.

This is the issue my customer was having and what shook me out of my slumber to start getting hands on again and writing up the results. What I will be covering over this series of blogs will be the steps to get you to the latest and greatest version of VVF from different start points. We will begin with a green field 9.0 deployment, then move onto lifecycle managing this and showing the steps needed to get to 9.0.1 which was recently released. The final part will cover how to get a vSphere 8 environment to VVF 9.

The articles will be open and honest on the process but also show why planning and taking your time will always win out in the end. I have not been in a proper lab environment for a while, and I was rushing to get the demo ready and I missed a number of configurations that caused deployments to fail and cost me times. I will mention all these as I go along to hopefully mean you don’t repeat my mistakes. All of this is based on a nested lab environment so the majority of issues I encountered were because of that, but the deployment and upgrade processes will be the same whether it be nested or physical.