If you want to deploy a new VCF 5.2 Management Workload Domain using the Cloud Builder Appliance and want to activate the EVC mode during the deployment (what IMO you should always do except in the lab), it will unfortunately fail in the step “Enable Cluster EVC Mode”. Inexplicably, the deployment activates EVC mode after creating the vSAN cluster and moving the vCenter to the cluster, instead of first enabling EVC and then moving the vCenter (aka bootstrap installation).

If you don’t want to redeploy VCF there is a possible workaround if you have an additional ESXi host with a local datastore. Just add this host to the same Datacenter in your vCenter and migrate the vCenter VM to this host. After that is done you can do a Retry in the Cloud Builder. The deployment should proceed.

Later you will inevitably run into a consequential error during the NSX configuration step “Update Firewall Exclusion List”. If you cannot migrate the vCenter VM back to the now EVC enabled vSAN cluster because of a lower EVC level you must clone it. First rename the orginal vCenter VM Object which is running on the additional host. Then clone the vCenter VM to the cluster using the original name and later change it to the vDS port group. Note the host where it is registered to, shutdown the original vCenter and start the cloned vCenter using the ESXi Host Client. Now you can do a Retry in the Cloud Builder and hopefully finish your deployment successfully.

I hope this short post can be helpful to you. Feel free to share if you like…

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Date: 24.09.2024
Version: 1.0