VCF 9.1.1 Lab Rebuild

📘 Official documentation. This is a lab walkthrough, not a replacement for the vendor docs. For the authoritative, supported procedures, follow Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 documentation. Where this guide and the official docs differ, the official docs win.

I am rebuilding my VCF lab on 9.1.1. This guide follows that build, step by step, so you can follow along with your own.

This guide is published live

The guide is not finished, and it is not written after the fact. Each page goes up as the build reaches that stage. Pages will be added, reordered and corrected while the build is running. If a page is not in the list below, the build has not got there yet.

When the build is complete, this guide becomes the 9.1.1 rebuild guide and replaces the VCF 9.1 lab series.

Who writes it

The build, the design choices and the screenshots are mine. Most of the writing is done by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model. It works from my build notes, my screenshots and my direction, and it checks the steps against the product documentation. I am stating that here so it is clear how the guide is produced.

How to read it

• Every step says where you are. Which system, and which part of it — for example the stage of the VCF Installer wizard, or the application a setting lives in.
• Lab services are named by what they are. The lab runs services that are not part of VCF, such as an identity provider, a secrets store, NetBox and a NAS. Each one is introduced with what it is and what it does in the lab. You will need your own equivalent; the guide says what it has to provide.
• References are cited. Each section points to the design decision, recommendation or requirement it rests on, with the document, version and page. Where the lab does something different from the recommendation, the page says so and gives the reason.
• The scripts are public. Where a page uses one of my build scripts, it links to it in pgnet-vcflab, with a made-up inventory so you can run it. That repo is lab-only, unsupported, personal work, and not endorsed by Broadcom.
• Salt is described, not shown. I automate a lot of the lab with Salt. Where a step uses it, the guide explains what the automation does. The Salt code will be published separately later.
• Patterns explain the why. Where I do something a particular way across the lab, the pattern is explained once, with a diagram, and linked from the steps that use it.
• No passwords. Credentials are never shown. IP addresses, VLAN IDs and VCF component names are the real ones from the lab, so the steps and the screenshots match.

Pages

Pages are listed here as they are published.