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Automating License Entitlement Workflows between VCF Operations & VCF Business Service Console (BSC)

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In an air-gapped or disconnected environment, license entitlement for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) involves a multi-step file exchange between the VCF Business Service Console (BSC) and your deployed VCF Operations instance.

Below is a visual that outlines the workflow between VCF BSC (red) and VCF Operations (orange):

Note: This workflow is also applicable to VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) deployments as well.

For organizations managing multiple VCF Fleet deployments, automation is essential to operating at scale. Back in September, I had written a blog post that demonstrated some of the VCF Operations APIs that can be used to address the orange boxes above, but that was only half the solution.

However, the steps outlined in the red boxes were not covered and a recent question came up on whether those operations could also be automated?

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Dynamically Rebalance or Evacuate VKS Control Plane / Worker Nodes across vSphere Zones in VCF 9.0

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vSphere Zones in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 have been enhanced to offer greater flexibility in resource consumption and isolation for both vSphere Supervisor Control Plane VMs (Management), vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Cluster (Workloads) or a combination of the two.


Depending on your required level of management availability and workload isolation, administrations have several vSphere Supervisor Zone deployment options to select from:

Note: The management zone selection (single vs multi) is only configurable during the initial enablement of vSphere Supervisor. It is currently NOT possible to reconfigure the vSphere Supervisor to switch from a single to multi-zone management without re-deploying vSphere Supervisor.

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Increasing VCF Installer & SDDC Manager Timeout for NSX Deployment

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For resource constrained environments, deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) can take longer, especially when deploying on top of a Nested ESXi configuration. However, the VCF Installer does provide a robust retry function that typically will resolve most intermediate issues.

With that said, for environments that are more resource constrained, you may notice the NSX Manager component fails to complete its initialization within the default timeout period. Users can increase the timeout by adding nsxt.manager.wait.minutes to increase the time out (minutes) that VCF Installer / SDDC Manager will wait for NSX to be ready.

echo "nsxt.manager.wait.minutes=180" >> /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties
echo 'y' | /opt/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/scripts/cli/sddcmanager_restart_services.sh

Note: SDDC Manager is responsible for deploying NSX, so the setting above should be applied to SDDC Manager. The default behavior of the VCF Installer is to switch to the SDDC Manager function, which means the setting above is actually applied to the VCF Installer unless you are overriding this behavior within the JSON deployment file.

If you need to increase the timeout for the NSX Edge Deployment, users can add edge.node.vm.creation.max.wait.minutes to increase the time out (minutes) that VCF Installer / SDDC Manager will wait for the NSX Edge to be ready.

echo "edge.node.vm.creation.max.wait.minutes=90" >> /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties
echo 'y' | /opt/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/scripts/cli/sddcmanager_restart_services.sh

Note: Settings above are applicable for both VCF 5.x and VCF 9.x

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