VCF Automation

Quick Tip: How to Identify Which Kubernetes Cluster Owns a vSphere Container Volume (PV)

06.25.2026 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I was recently cleaning up some orphaned vSphere Container Volumes and while I was able to compare the Persistent Volumes (PV) IDs against the ones currently in use by a couple of Kubernetes clusters, I wanted to be 100% sure before removing them, especially since I planned bulk delete using PowerCLI’s Remove-CnsVolume cmdlet.

You can view all provisioned vSphere Container Volumes in the vSphere UI by navigating to vSphere Cluster->Monitor->Cloud Native Storage->Container Volumes. In addition to the volume details, you also get access to all of the associated metadata and labels, very similar to what you would see using kubectl, which is quite nice!

While reviewing the PV IDs in the UI, I noticed an attribute named Kubernetes Cluster, which appeared to identify the Kubernetes (K8s) cluster that owned the volume. How do I find this Kubernetes Cluster ID?

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VCF 9.1 - Quick Tip: Uninstalling Optional Day-N Components

06.11.2026 by William Lam // 2 Comments

There are a number of new capabilities in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 that can be deployed as Day-N operations after the initial VCF Fleet deployment, including:

Integrated Log Management (formally VCF Operations for Logs) directly within VCF Operations
Real-time Metrics that can provide up to 2 seconds of granularity
Network visibility and diagnostics with VCF Operations for Networks (VON)
Modern Self-Service with Multi-Tenancy using VCF Automation (VCFA)

If you need to uninstall one of these Day-N components, there is currently not a UI workflow within the VCF LCM UI. With that said, we do have a KB article that provides a clean up script that can also be used to uninstall these optional VCF components.

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VCF 9.1 - Deploying VCF Automation (VCFA) to non-Management Network

06.05.2026 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Similar to VCF Management Services (VCFMS), VCF Automation (VCFA) can also be deployed to a non-management network using an API workflow. A typically deployment workflow is to first upgrade to VCF 9.1, deploy VCFMS and then deploy VCFA as a Day-N operation using the new VCF Operations Fleet Lifecycle Management (Fleet LCM) capability, located within VCF Operations under Build->Lifecycle->VCF Management.

When using the Fleet LCM UI to deploy VCFA, you will see that the required IP address input uses a CIDR format. This is not ideal for VCFA, which requires exactly 5 IP addresses for the VCF services runtime; the smallest CIDR that meets this requirement is a /29, which ends up consuming 8 IP addresses.

The good news is that we can use the Fleet LCM API to select an alternative vSphere-based network (VLAN or NSX Overlay) and we also get added benefit to use an alternative IP allocation method, which would allow us to specify the exact number of IP Addresses that is required!

Note: This solution is only applicable for brand new deployments of VCFA, for existing Aria Automation 8.x or VCF Automation 9.0.x/9.1.x deployments, the upgrade workflow will use the existing network that VCFA is deployed on and will availabled IP Addresses from that network.

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