You can onboard an existing vSphere/VVF environment via the UI and turn it into a Management Workload Domain. In a VVF 9 environment, you already have a functional “Mini-SDDC” (vCenter + VCF Ops).

In VVF, your VCF Ops instance is just a monitoring tool. Once you complete this “Convergence” into VCF 9, VCF Ops becomes the primary interface for Fleet Management and It coordinates with SDDC Manager to provide the “Single Pane of Glass” for the whole private cloud.

In this exercise we are moving an environment from VVF9 to VCF9 so its all non NSX backed segments at this moment.

VCF Converge is the process of onboarding an existing, unmanaged vSphere environment into VMware Cloud Foundation. Instead of deploying a brand new SDDC stack, Converge allows SDDC Manager to discover, validate, and adopt your existing vCenter, ESXi hosts, vSAN clusters, and NSX instances — placing them under VCF lifecycle management so convergence in VCF 9 means these silos have been collapsed into a single VCF Operations interface.

Regardless of which version you target, these items need attention before you deploy the VCF Installer.

Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM). VCF does not support ELM. If your vCenters are in an ELM topology, you need to break them apart first. VCF 9 replaces ELM with vCenter Grouping, which gives similar cross-vCenter visibility without the architectural headaches.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager Image Mode is mandatory. Baseline-managed (VUM-based) clusters are not supported in vSphere 9 or VCF 9. If your clusters still use baselines, convert them to image-based management before converging. This is a common validation failure people hit during the process.

vDS version must be supported. Check your Distributed Virtual Switch version and upgrade if needed. The VCF Installer validation will catch this, but better to handle it proactively.

vCenter must be self-hosted. The vCenter VM must reside within its own cluster’s inventory.

Version Requirement — All ESXi hosts and vCenter in this are running version 9.0

Precheck the vCenter Server

VCF Import Tool is provided by default inside the vcf installer so you no longer need to download this separately .

python vcf_brownfield.py precheck --vcenter 'vcenter9-1.ash.local' --sso-user 'administrator@vsphere.local' --sso-password 'SuperSecretPassword'

python vcf_brownfield.py precheck --vcenter 'vcenter9-1.ash.local' --sso-user 'administrator@vsphere.local' --sso-password 'SuperSecretPassword'

Migrate vCenter 9 VVF to vCF9- Converge

VCF Installer runs a comprehensive pre-check against your existing environment — validating DNS, NTP, versions, networking configuration, and hardware compatibility. Any failures must be resolved before proceeding.

We are migrating standalone components to the VCF Fleet. Enable SSH on all ESX hosts and download the NSX 9.0.2 binary for the upgrade to version 9.0.2 from the sddc manager. NSX will be installed as part of the converge.

In the vCF installer, select VMware Cloud Foundation.

When you run the VCF 9 Installer and select “Deploy New Fleet”, you aren’t just starting from scratch; you are choosing to reuse those specific VVF pieces so in this it just

Installs SDDC Manager (which VVF does not have).
Installs NSX (which VVF does not have).
Onboards the existing VVF vCenter as the “Management Domain” vCenter.
Onboards the existing VVF VCF Ops instance to become the “Fleet” operations manager.

We are onboarding vCF Operations from the VVF environment into the VCF fleet, along with vCenter it deployed.

Select the required SDDC Manager version, so I’ll choose 9.0.2 since all components are downloaded. Select HA for production and enable CEIP; otherwise, some components may not function. You can disable it after deployment if needed.

Select the existing VCF Operations from our base stack. Provide the details for the new fleet and collector appliances required for deployment, ensuring that the password is at least 15 characters long.

You can onboard or deploy automation here, or use lcm/flt to do it later.

Provide details of our current vCenter for fleet convergence.

Because VVF usually runs on standard VLAN-backed port groups, the convergence process installs the NSX Managers first. Existing NSX cannot be converged — a new NSX 9.0 instance is deployed but during the initial convergence, the system maps the TEP functionality to vmk0 (Management interface) so TEPs must be recreated via TNP once the Converge is completed.

In the past we had to generate an NSX Deployment Specification for converting or importing existing vSphere environments so i’ve skipped that here to just let the installer handle it all.