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Quick Tip - Deploy OVF/OVA with Basic Authentication Endpoint

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As part of rebuilding my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.1 environment, a refresh of my VCF (Offline) Software Depot was needed to include the latest 9.0.1 binaries including various OVF/OVAs like Data Services Manager (DSM).

My VCF Software Depot has been configured with basic authentication, which is a requirement for the VCF Installer. This meant before I can import the DSM OVA into vCenter Server, I typically would need to download a local copy of the OVA, which got me thinking about this workflow ...

Can an OVF/OVA be deployed directly from a web server that requires basic authentication? 🤔

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Scaling ESX DCUI & Console for Compressed Screen Resolution

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I recently shared my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Mini Rack build, which includes the use of a tiny 7" LCD screen for direct console access to the ESX hosts. Since the LCD is optimizing for the 10" inch rack, it is also using a non-standard resolution of 1280x400, which can make the output pretty compressed as you can see from the ESX DCUI screen.


This is definitely a niche use case, but I was curious if we had any workarounds that could be used to improve the screen resolution, especially handling large amounts of text when going into the ESX Shell 🤔

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Automating VCF Automation (VCFA) Configuration using VCFA Terraform Provider

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I recently rebuilt my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) lab environment to run the latest VCF 9.0.1 release. While most of the deployment and configuration has been fully automated, I was dreading the VMware Cloud Foundation Automation (VCFA) setup, mainly as the initial configuration can be a bit involved.


Having some experience with configuring VCFA manually, I wanted to take the opportunity to automate as much of the setup as I could, so the next that I need to rebuild, it is not an issue for me, which is typically the case as I like to automate everything!

My automation approach was going to be leveraging the newly published Terraform Provider for VCFA, this was on my todo list but I finally got a chance to play with it over the weekend in my lab.

I was blown away at how the automation was at configuring VCFA, the same manual tasks could  easily 20min+ and using the TP4VCFA, it was done in under 30 seconds! 🤯

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