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Quick Tip - Downloading VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Consumption CLI for Air-Gapped Environments

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Prior to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, you needed to install a custom kubectl vSphere plugin to interact with the vSphere Supervisor and deploy workloads such as vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), VM Service, and Data Services.

This custom kubectl plugin was bundled with the vSphere Supervisor release, which meant it could only be downloaded after vSphere Supervisor was enabled and a vSphere Namespace had been created, since the namespace provided the link to the hosted binary.


In VCF 9.0, the kubectl vSphere plugin has been deprecated and has been replaced with the new VCF Consumption CLI which can be used to interact with both vSphere Supervisor Namespaces and/or VCF Automation Namespaces.

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Quick Tip - Using VCF CLI to login to vSphere Supervisor when configured with VCF Automation

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When a vSphere Supervisor Cluster is configured to be consumed by VCF Automation, the Identity Provider (IdP) for that vSphere Supervisor is automatically configured to redirect to VCF Automation (VCFA) as an OIDC relay.


When an end user wishes to access or manage their resources, they will be directed to the IdP that has been configured for their Organization Portal. To create a k8s login context, they will need to create a VCFA API token that is then passed to the VCF CLI before they can interact with their resources using kubectl.

Below is an example VCF CLI command where I am logging into an Organization Portal called legal and I have specified my VCFA endpoint along with the VCFA API Token to login as an end user.

vcf context create legal --endpoint auto01.vcf.lab --api-token $VCF_CLI_VCFA_API_TOKEN --insecure-skip-tls-verify --type cci --tenant-name legal

However, if you are an administrator who is managing the underlying VCF Infrastructure and need to troubleshoot or access the vSphere Supervisor Cluster, an alternative workflow will be required.

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Managing Storage for VCF Automation (VCFA) Content Library Transfer Spooling Area

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When a user uploads an ISO/OVF/OVA from their desktop to VCF Automation (VCFA) Content Library, the file is temporarily stored in the Transfer Spooling Area (TSA) that resides locally within VCFA before it is finally transferred to the destination vCenter Server.


By default, VCFA uses an embedded object store backed by SeaweedFS to hold the temporary user files, which are stored in 64MB chunks. The size of the SeaweedFS volumes will be based on the VCFA deployment mode (single node vs multi-node for HA). A total of three volumes (3 replicas) will always be configured regardless of the deployment mode for VCFA and the total usable storage capacity is sum of these three volumes.

  • Single Node, each volume is 75GB
  • Multi-Node (Medium), each volume is 150GB
  • Multi-Node (Large), each volume is 200GB

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