vSphere 7 Lab - Nested deployment of VCSA 7 on VMware Workstation

In this post, I would talk about the changes noticed during the nested vSphere 7 Lab deployment and when tried to initially access the vCenter using WebClient.

For direct nested deployment where you are deploying the VCSA directly on VMware Workstation 13.x or later, its a three-step process but before we go into that, extract the VCSA7 iso file and locate the vcsa folder, there you will find the VCSA appliance OVA file.

• Right-click on vcsa open virtualization archive (ova) file and select open with VMware workstation or double click on this ova file => in subsequent screens follow the screen instruction and then provide the required IP, DNS, Gateway, FQDN etc and deploy the actual appliance
• Once the appliance is successfully deployed, set up its root password by accessing it through workstation console
• Now go to https://vcsa_fqdn_or_ip:5480, login with root and complete the rest of the configuration and deployment, vCenter PSC setup, create administrator password etc.

However, when I tried the same with VCSA 7 on the latest version on VMware Workstation 15.5.2, I was able to deploy and configure the appliance but was unable to access the vSphere WebClient.
I was able to access the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) and complete the rest of the configuration however when tried to access the vSphere WebClient it simply failed.

Checked the status of the related services. found no issue however now I recall there was some error occurred during the VCSA appliance configuration however and there was no successfully completed message.

Then I thought to go with the standard lab deployment procedure, where we deploy VCSA on one of the already deployed ESXi hosts (double nested).

Once the deployment completed then I was able to access the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) by going to https://vcsa_fqdn_or_ip:5480 and VCSA by going to https://vcsa_fqdn_or_ip:443 or just https://vcsa_fqdn_or_ip however, noticed that we no longer have flash-based WebClient client available (remember this url, https://fqdn_or_ip:9443/vsphere-client/). 

Now it is just HTML5 based WebClient.

As you can see, unlike vCenter 6.x there is no Flex-based vSphere WebClient option available.

One can access the vCenter Server by using the following url, https://vcsa_fqdn_or_ip/ui/

One more thing which I noticed that VMware Workstation 15.5.2 doesn't have ESXi 7 listed in supported OS list however I didn't see any issue when deployed it by selecting ESXi6.7. Hopefully, this would be available with the next update of the workstation.

Update: Tried to re-deploy the VCSA 7 appliance directly on VMware Workstation again and this time during post configuration deployment it got stuck at 70% with a page refresh error message however I waited for around 20 more minutes before hitting the browser refresh button which brought me to vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface (VAMI). Checked about the status of services and configuration and then tried to access it again using the https://vcsa_fqdn_or_ip and voila getting started page opened with an option to launch vSphere Client (HTML5) like shown in the first screenshot.

That's it for now...Thanks :)