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

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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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VCF 9.1 - Unable to fetch plugin metadata for VCF Consumption CLI

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I recently came across an issue while syncing the VCF Consumption CLI plugins, it would always show the following attempting to fetch 9.0.1 plugin even though my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF environment was already at 9.1.

> vcf plugin sync

[i] The vcf cli essential plugins have not been installed and are being installed now. The install may take a few seconds.
[i] Installing plugins from plugin group 'vmware-vcfcli/essentials:v9.0.1'
[x] Failed to install plugin 'telemetry:v9.0.1'
[!] unable to install plugin 'telemetry': unable to fetch the plugin metadata for plugin "telemetry": unable fetch plugin binary: Collecting images: GET https://projects.packages.broadcom.com/v2/vcf/vcf-cli-plugins/ga/vmware/vcfcli/darwin/amd64/telemetry/manifests/v9.0.1: MANIFEST_UNKNOWN: The named manifest is not known to the registry.; map[manifest:vcf/vcf-cli-plugins/ga/vmware/vcfcli/darwin/amd64/telemetry]

[!] No active contexts available to perform plugin sync

After reaching out to Engineering, I came to learn that the behavior of the VCF Consumption CLI in 9.1 has changed and no longer pulls from the Broadcom public repository. Users can either download the VCF Consumption Plugins and relocate the OCI images into their own container registry or for an air-gapped environment, the plugins can also be installed locally.

I opted for second option for simplicity sake even though I do have Harbor Container Registry running.

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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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