VCF 9.x Deployment Validation Fails With VCmanager Found Less Than Two Uplinks

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager / VCF Installer
• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) greenfield deployment fails during the validation phase when resumed via a JSON specification file. The validation engine returns the following error:

VCmanager Found less than two uplinks for the DVS

Symptoms include failure to proceed past the network validation stage.

Environment

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x

Cause

The deployment JSON specification file defines fewer than two physical network interface cards (pNICs) for the Management Domain Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) uplinks, violating the VCF minimum requirement for network redundancy and high availability. Modifying the vSphere Client UI out-of-band to bypass the error introduces configuration drift and does not resolve the root cause within the JSON source of truth.

Resolution

1. Halt the current validation run in VMware Cloud Builder.

2. Edit the deployment JSON file used to resume the deployment.

3. Locate the networkSpecs or hostSpecs block defining the switch topology.

4. Modify the vmnics array for the DVS uplinks to explicitly define a minimum of two physical adapters (e.g., ["vmnic0", "vmnic1"]) for every ESXi host in the deployment.

5. Re-upload the corrected JSON payload to Cloud Builder.

6. Restart the validation phase.

Note: Do not make manual out-of-band changes via the vSphere Client UI to bypass Cloud Builder validation, as this causes configuration drift and subsequent orchestration failures.

Additional Information

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Deployment Guide