From the moment new hardware is procured and delivered to a datacenter, the race is on for it to switch from a liability to a money producing asset for the business. This document provides discrete instruction on how to combine two solutions that are focused on helping customers complete hardware deployment as quickly as possible with no errors: SmartConfig and VMware Cloud Foundation. These solutions use pre-validated blueprints that take the vast majority of the guesswork out of the deployment process; streamlining and automating formerly repetitive tasks at a substantially faster pace.
Our goal of this exercise is to begin with a blank canvas (i.e. FlashStack hardware that has been racked, powered, cabled and factory reset) that will result in a fully-functional VMware environment ready for production workloads. All of this will have been built with repeatable, customizable blueprints which in almost all cases completely eliminate the need for the administrator to touch any single piece of the underlying setup. Perhaps even more important is that the bulk of the steps outlined in each section of this guide can be exported to a JSON and then repeated or updated based upon unique customer environment requirements over and over again.
Following some introduction to the key technologies in play, we have divided the in-depth deployment instructions into 3 core parts.