Prepare ESXi Hosts for VMware Cloud Foundation

Before you can begin the process of deploying
VMware Cloud Foundation
you must prepare the
ESXi
hosts that will form the management domain. To create a new VI workload domain, you must also prepare the
ESXi
hosts in advance.
The management domain requires a minimum of four
ESXi
hosts. VI workload domain, you must prepare a minimum of three
ESXi
hosts.
If you are preparing ESXi hosts for a vSphere cluster using NFS, VMFS on FC, or vVols as principal storage, and the hosts will be added to a VI workload domain using vSphere Lifecycle Manager images as the update method, then only two hosts are required.
Preparing the
ESXi
hosts involves installing the correct version of
ESXi
and performing some basic configuration tasks.
VMware Cloud Foundation
supports two methods for preparing these
ESXi
hosts, either interactively or through the use of the
VMware Imaging Appliance service
(VIA) which is bundled within
VMware Cloud Builder
. For the supported
ESXi
version, see the Bill of Materials (BOM) section of the
VMware Cloud Foundation Release Notes
.