How to skip vSAN HCL Checks for ESXi Upgrades

In my current role I get to play around with VMware Cloud Foundation a lot. We do have a rather large environment where I work.

Because all the currently supported hardware is being used inside our VCF 3.10.1 environment I had to use our outdated hardware to build a small consolidated VCF 4 environment.

As most of you know, two days ago VMware released VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 which comes with the newly released vSphere (and vSAN) 7.0 Update 1. So I wanted to go ahead and patch my consolidated VCF 4.0 environment to 4.1.

The Update process is quite straightforward as one would expect from VCF:
– Update SDDC Manager from 4.0 to 4.1
– Install “configuration drift package 4.1” for SDDC manager
– Update to NSX-T 3.0.2
– Update to vCenter 7.0 Update 1
– Update to ESXi 7.0 Update 1

Because my hardware is very outdated and the array controller is not on the HCL for any current releases the update of my ESXi inevitably fails. Precheck fails of course as well and points out the HCL mismatch.

There is currently no official way of ignoring those according to my contacts at VMware. However, because I also had to configure a proxy server on my sddc manager (I followed this link to do so) I knew about the “application-prod.properties” file already. I’ve decided to take a look at this file then.

A quick search for “vsan” inside the /opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-app/conf/application-prod.properties file revealed three interesting lines starting at line number 103:

################### VSAN CONFIGURATION ###################
vsan.healthcheck.enabled=true
vsan.hcl.update.enabled=true
vsan.precheck.enabled=true

Now because this is my own lab environment I did not care if I would break sddc manager and so I changed the above lines to “false”:

################### VSAN CONFIGURATION ###################
vsan.healthcheck.enabled=false
vsan.hcl.update.enabled=false
vsan.precheck.enabled=false

I then saved the file and restarted lcm using

systemctl restart lcm

And afterwards the Pre-Check did not even list the vSAN Pre-Checks anymore and therefore passed with flying colors:

I immediately started the Update for my 4 ESXi hosts and it turned out to go through as well:

The Update was successful for all my 4 Nodes. I did not see anything broken in my sddc manager due to my change except for the now missing vSAN HCL checks in the Precheck. I would not recommend you to change these settings in a productive environment but it is good to know that we can use VCF in lab environments that make use of “unsupported” hardware.