A VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) release consists of a collection of VCF components that is categorized as either an installation or patch/upgrade file. In VCF 4.x/5.x, a VCF component would contain two different identifiers, a UUID as well as something called a Bundle ID (e.g. bundle-XXX where XXX is some numeric number). In VCF 9.x, the old Bundle ID format is no longer used and simply converges with using the UUID, uniquely identifying a given VCF component.
When a customer downloads a VCF release, they only need to deal with the VCF release version (e.g. 5.2.1.0 or 9.0.1.0) and not the individual bundle IDs. With that said, if you need to download a specific VCF component, especially when using the VCF Download Tool (VCFDT), then it would helpful to understand the specific VCF component ID whether this is for VCF 4.x/5.x or VCF 9.x
The latest version of the VCFDT (9.0.1) can be used for both VCF 4.x/5.x and 9.x environments, however there are specific command-line tools that you will need to use that is based on your version of VCF.
- For VCF 9.x you will use vcf-download-tool
- For VCF 4.x/5.x you will use lcm-bundle-transfer-util
Here is a VCF 9.x example in listing all available VCF components for VCF 9.0.1.0 release:
vcf-download-tool binaries list --depot-download-token-file ~/Desktop/prod-token --vcf-version 9.0.1.0
Here is an example output based on the command above:
To download a specific VCF 9.x component bundle, we can now run the following by providing the component ID:
vcf-download-tool binaries download --depot-store ~/Desktop/VCF901 --depot-download-token-file ~/Desktop/prod-token --id=e0639741-fe5b-4848-aa28-642f68fd1353
Here is a VCF 5.x example in listing all available VCF components for VCF 5.2.1.0 release:
lcm-bundle-transfer-util --listBundles --depotDownloadToken $TOKEN --productVersion 5.2.1.0
Here is an example output based on the command above:
To download a specific VCF 5.x component bundle, we can now run the following by providing the Bundle ID:
lcm-bundle-transfer-util --download --outputDirectory ~/Desktop/VCF5210 --depotDownloadToken $TOKEN --bundle bundle-133761
For those interested, the various VCF component IDs are dynamically fetched from the VCF metadata files, which are refreshed with each new release. With this information, we can actually build a similar output that is much faster than using VCFDT, for this specific purpose. I have created a PowerShell script called VcfComponentBundleName.ps1 which contains two self-explanatory functions:
- Get-Vcf9ComponentBundleName
- Get-Vcf345ComponentBundleName
Step 1 - Download and source the VcfComponentBundleName.ps1 script to get access to the two functions:
. ./VcfComponentBundleName.ps1
Step 2 - You will need to have a valid Broadcom Download Token, if you have not already generated one.
To retrieve the VCF Component IDs for the VCF 9.0.1.0 release, you can run the following command:
Get-Vcf9ComponentBundleName -BroadcomDownloadToken $BroadcomDownloadToken -Version '9.0.1.0'
To retrieve the VCF Component Bundle IDs for the VCF 5.2.1.0 release, you can run the following command:
Get-VCf345ComponentBundleName -BroadcomDownloadToken $BroadcomDownloadToken -Version "5.2.1.0"
Note: Unlike VCF 9.x function which has a more comprehensive output as it uses a newer way to encode the metadata, the VCF 4.x/5.x is limited to the core SDDC Components. If you need other VCF components for VCF 5.x, you will still need to use the lcm-bundle-transfer-util
Thanks for the comment!