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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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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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