Quick Tip - Downloading VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Consumption CLI for Air-Gapped Environments

Prior to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, you needed to install a custom kubectl vSphere plugin to interact with the vSphere Supervisor and deploy workloads such as vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), VM Service, and Data Services.

This custom kubectl plugin was bundled with the vSphere Supervisor release, which meant it could only be downloaded after vSphere Supervisor was enabled and a vSphere Namespace had been created, since the namespace provided the link to the hosted binary.

In VCF 9.0, the kubectl vSphere plugin has been deprecated and has been replaced with the new VCF Consumption CLI which can be used to interact with both vSphere Supervisor Namespaces and/or VCF Automation Namespaces.

Users can continue to download the deprecated kubectl vSphere plugin as well as the new VCF Consumption CLI located within the vSphere UI summary portlet of the vSphere Namespace. One welcome change is that the new VCF Consumption CLI is no longer shipping with the vSphere Supervisor release and you can now download it directly from Broadcom's online repository. I recently had a question about downloading the CLI for dark site/air-gapped environment.

For your convenience, here are the direct download URLs for each operating system and its architecture:

macOS

Linux

Windows

In addition to the VCF Consumption CLI, there are also the VCF Consumption Plugins which will require you to setup a Docker-compatible registry where VCF Consumption CLI Clients will connect to pull down specific plugins you wish to enable. You can refer to official VCF documentation for downloading the plugins and transferring them to your private registry for use.

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