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Can you really deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) without DNS and NTP?

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The simple answer is Yes. Now, you might be wondering why anyone would want to put themselves through the pain without setting up proper DNS and NTP?

Well, not all environments have the luxury of having either outbound connectivity and/or access to basic infrastructure services like DNS and NTP. This may come as a surprise to some, but there are customers out there that need to operate in very unique and constrained environments. One such example of this is typically from customers that need to deploy vSphere in a "dark site" where local infrastructure services like DNS and NTP are not available.


I recently re-validated this deployment model using the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release running on an Intel NUC 11 which had no outbound connectivity and it was only connected to my laptop, which also had no outbound connectivity or access to DNS or NTP. Since this question recently came up from a customer who was looking to automate this, so I ran through the deployment workflow using the VCSA CLI Installer but this should also be possible with VCSA UI Installer as the same options are supported.

OK, so how do you make this work?

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Integrated NSX-T deployment in vSphere 7.0 Update 3 fails with timeout

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One of the new features highlighted in the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release is the integrated NSX-T deployment and configuration workflow found directly within the vSphere UI as shown in the screenshot below.


After you click on the the "Install NSX" button, it will prompt for the NSX-T OVA and then take users through a guided wizard to on deploying and configuring NSX-T. I noticed that a few users were reporting a timeout issue after running through the workflow:

Cannot complete the operation: See the event log for details. Timeout: The task did not complete within the expected time span

I have not used this plugin before, so I was not sure what the issue was until I came across this Tweet from Validimir Velikov, a vSphere UI Engineer who had worked on the integrated NSX-T plugin and shared the reason for this error. A newer version of NSX-T will be needed to use this feature as the vSphere UI expects a "callback" from NSX-T Manager when the deployment and configuration is complete, which the current released version of NSX-T (3.1.3.1) does not support.

I think we could have provided a better user experience by first checking the NSX-T OVA version and ensuring that it meets the minimum version that supports this capability. Hopefully this is something we can improve upon in the future.

How to programmatically retrieve vCenter Server Patch & Update History?

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After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release, I was just looking at the "History" tab within the Virtual Machine Management Interface (VAMI), which gives you a historical view of all the patches and updates that have been applied to your vCenter Server since its initial deployment. I am not exactly sure when this was feature was introduced, but it can definitely be useful for both auditing but also debugging/troubleshooting purposes.

Of course, I was curious about this information and wanted to see if I could retrieve it using something like PowerCLI. However when I started to look for the API, I realized that there may not be a public API for this ... but that did not stopped me and taking a look at Chrome Developer, I quickly saw the endpoint which was /rest/appliance/update/history and I was able to figure out a workaround giving the same data.

Below are two examples on accessing this data using either PowerShell or cURL

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