Since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 back in May, customer excitement has been tremendous, with many deploying the latest release in their labs for evaluation and some even using it for pre-production environments. VCF 9.1 introduces a wide range of new capabilities, but experimenting with certain features can sometimes require supporting infrastructure that may not already exist in a lab environment, such as an OIDC provider for VCF Single Sign-On (SSO) or a web server to host VCF binaries.
I noticed a growing number of point solutions emerging within the community to simplify VCF deployments and make it easier to explore its capabilities in a lab environment. With the advent of AI, the barrier to entry has dropped dramatically, allowing more people with little to no programming experience to build useful tools.
I had been using ChatGPT and Gemini for quite some time but had not yet tried any of the newer agentic development tools, such as Claude Code or Cursor. Since I was already active in the OpenAI ecosystem, I decided to give Codex a try, especially given the rapid pace of development the platform was going through.
Here is a tweet from me on May 16, 2026 on my initial experience w/Codex:
Once you experience Agentic Dev ... 🤯
Had idea last night, wasn't taking it seriously. Ask Codex (free) to build me HTML prototype, it looked so good! Ask it to go further this morning, ran out of free request ... subscribed to Pro to continue pet project 😎
Future is wild! 🚀
— William Lam (@lamw) May 16, 2026
Here is a screenshot of the original HTML prototype that Codex generated from my initial requirements. Unfortunately, I no longer have the original prompt due to context compaction.
It took Codex roughly 15 minutes to go from a high-level prototype to a fully functional web application, something that would have taken me considerably longer to build on my own, especially given my limited web development experience.
Since I have some experience building virtual appliances, packaging the web application was straightforward once I gave Codex the deployment requirements. Over the past couple of months, I have continued iterating on this personal project as time has permitted, refining its capabilities and overall user experience.
Today, I am excited to introduce the VCF Infrastructure Services (VIS) Appliance, an Ubuntu-based virtual appliance that provides key infrastructure services to accelerate VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 lab and proof-of-concept deployments. VIS includes a user-friendly web management interface that enables users to quickly get started without requiring in-depth knowledge of the underlying services.
VIS is a small virtual appliance (2 vCPU, 4GB memory and 30GB storage) that currently supports the following services:
- Software Depot for hosting VCF software binaries
- SFTP Backup server for configuring VCF backups
- Container Registry for vSphere Supervisor and vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) workflows
- LDAP Provider for VCF Single Sign-On (SSO)
- OIDC Provider for VCF SSO
- DNS Server for lab hostname and reverse lookup records
- NTP Server for VCF appliances, ESX hosts, and supporting lab systems
- DHCP Server for appliance-managed lab network addressing
- Key Management Service for KMIP-compatible encryption workflows
- Shared TLS certificate management for all supported services
To learn more about VIS and to try it out for yourself, please visit: https://lamw.github.io/vcf-infrastructure-service-appliance/
Why not holodeck?
If you do NOT meet the requirements for Holodeck, which can be quite significant as it deploys everything in a Nested environment OR if you prefer to do a physical deployment, then VIS is a nice way to pre-bundle a lot of the key infrastructure services. At the end of the day, it just depends on what you're trying to do and what constraints you might have
This is just crazy awesome...