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VCF 9.1 - Automating New License Entitlement Workflow between VCF Operations & VCF Business Service Console (BSC)

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 introduces a few new updates with the license entitlement workflow between VCF Operations and VCF Business Service Console (BSC) for users operating in an air-gapped or disconnected environment.

Below is a visual that outlines the workflow between VCF BSC (red) and VCF Operations (orange), along with the new changes in 9.1:


Whether your organization will have a single or multiple VCF Fleets, automation is essential for consistency and operating at scale.

Last year, I had created a PowerShell Module called Broadcom.Community.VCFLicensing that can help users fully automate the end-to-end licensing entitlement process and I am please to share that it has now been refreshed to support VCF 9.1!

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VCF 9.1 - Updated Method to Reset Identity Broker from previously managed VCF Operations for VCF Single Sign-On (SSO)

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Over the weekend, I had to re-deploy a portion of my VCF 9.1 Fleet, including VCF Operations, VCF Management Services, VCF License Server, SDDC Manager and VCF Automation, due to some workflows I was testing.

Luckily, my core SDDC components vCenter, NSX and vSAN was not touched and I could simply re-use those components by running the VCF Installer Import/Converge process to quickly rebuild my VCF 9.1 Fleet!

Prior to deleting VCF Operations, I had VCF Single Sign-On (SSO) configured and I wanted to make sure the core SDDC components were properly cleaned up. I successfully ran through the VCF SSO unjoin operation for all components and cleaned up the vCenter Server Advanced Setting (config.OPERATIONS.vcf.sso.ops.cluster.id), which was required with VCF 9.0.x before you could add it to a new VCF SSO configuration.


After my VCF 9.1 Fleet was re-deployed, the first thing I wanted to go setup was VCF SSO and I noticed the configuration button was grayed out and it had the following message:

No VCF instance available due to one of the following: no existing instance, invalid license, version below 9.0, setup in progress, already configured via another Operations or running ELM.

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Automating VCF 9.0 Single Sign-On (SSO) with OIDC-based Identity Provider

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Configuring VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Single Sign-On (SSO), introduced in VCF 9.0, can be quite lengthy, especially when you go through the workflow for the first time.


For my lab setup, I use Keycloak, a popular and free OIDC-based IdP, and have documented a step-by-step guide for using it with VCF SSO.

Even as an experienced user of VCF SSO, I find the configuration can still take several minutes, depending on your familiarity with the UI inputs. This is something I have wanted to automate for some time, but it meant digging into the private API calls used by the VCF Operations UI.

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