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

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When deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 Fleet, users specify either a Simple or High Availability (HA) deployment model along with the desired deployment size: Small, Medium or Large. Unlike components such as NSX Manager, VCF Operations and VCF Automation, where deployment size and availability are configured independently, VCF Management Services (VCFMS) determines its availability model based on the selected deployment size.

  • Simple
    • Small - 1 x Control Plane Node (4 vCPU & 10GB mem) + 3 x Worker Node (12 vCPU & 24GB mem)
  • High Availability
    • Medium - 3 x Control Plane Node (4 vCPU & 10GB mem) + 3 x Worker Node (24 vCPU & 48GB mem)
    • Large - 3 x Control Plane Node (8 vCPU & 12GB mem) + 3 x Worker Node (24 vCPU & 48GB mem)


While the Simple VCF deployment model is ideal for lab and proof-of-concept environments, it is also a good fit for smaller production environments. However, the only way to provide HA for VCF Management Services (VCFMS) using the VCF Operations Fleet LCM UI is by scaling up to either a Medium or Large deployment, which comes with additional worker nodes and increased resource consumption.

If only we had a way to enable high availability for a Small VCFMS deployment? 🤔

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Clarifying Minimum Required ESX Hosts for VCF Deployments

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The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.x Installer includes a built-in resource calculator that automatically determines the required compute and storage resources, along with the estimated number of ESX hosts needed to support the selected deployment configuration.


Understanding the compute and storage requirements is fairly straightforward, but the minimum number of ESX hosts required for a deployment is not always as clear, especially when factoring in the different supported principal storage types (vSAN, NFS and VMFS on Fibre Channel).

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VCF 9.1 - Auditing VCF Management Services (VCFMS) IP Pool Usage 

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As part of deploying the new VCF Management Services (VCFMS) component, a pool of IP addresses is provided to support the automatic deployment and scale-out of additional worker nodes for Day-N services such as Log Management and Real-time Metrics. In addition, these IP addresses are also reserved for lifecycle operations such as node recovery, rolling upgrades and scaling out additional service replicas, all of which may require additional IP capacity.


While you can view the current IP allocations by logging into VCF Operations and navigating to Build->Lifecycle->VCF Management and selecting the VCF Services Runtime component (VCFMS), there is currently no high-level view showing how many IP addresses have been consumed relative to the configured IP address pool(s). This can make capacity planning difficult and leave users unsure when additional IP pools may need to be added.

With the help of the VCF Fleet LCM APIs, we can easily audit the IP usage for a given VCFMS deployment and generate a more friendly report

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