After receiving an email asking about automating the deployment of VCF Operations 9.0 using the OVA image, I remembered that I had previously written a blog post on this topic back in 2014. Revisiting that article, it was clear the content needed to be refreshed, especially the OVF properties used within the script.

Since I have a written (not using AI) numerous deployment scripts over the years, I was able to quickly adapt the VCF Operations 9.0 changes and also enhance it a bit further.

Here is both PowerShell (using PowerCLI) and Bash Script (using OVFTool) to automate the deployment of VCF Operations 9.0 OVA

• PowerShell - deploy_vcf_operations.ps1
• Bash - deploy_vcf_operations.sh

In addition to deploying the VCF Operations OVA, it will power on the appliance and wait for the /admin URL endpoint to be ready before completing.

Note: Since the bash script uses OVFTool, there is a hidden OVF property that allows you to enable SSH if you need. This option is not available with the PowerShell script.

For additional VCF Operations configurations post-deployment, you can refer to the VCF Operations API.

Yesterday, I began upgrading my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment from version 9.0.1 to the latest 9.0.2 release. After successfully upgrading VCF Operations Fleet Manager, I then proceeded to upgrade VCF Operations, which includes running a pre-validation to ensure everything was okay before we can proceed.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I ran into the following error: "No space left on device" which was pretty vague, but I figured it had to do with my VCF Operations instance, since I was attempting to upgrade it ...

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Over the holidays, I was testing some new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) upgrade flows in my lab environment, where I ended up bricking SDDC Manager, which was completely my fault! While I had backups for the majority of the VCF components, I realized I did NOT have any backups for SDDC Manager itself 😢

With VCF 9.0, I realized I could simply leverage the built-in VCF Converge/Convert workflow that can take my existing vSphere-based deployment and turn it into a new VCF Fleet!

After a couple of hours, a new VCF Operations instance was deployed along with a new SDDC Manager that is now managing my existing vCenter Server. Since this was a new VCF Operations instance, I needed to reconfigure VCF SSO, so that I could have common authentication across all VCF Components.

Note: Make sure you have uninstalled both the old SDDC Manager and VCF Operations vSphere UI plugin as well as unregistering the SDDC Manager extension using the vSphere MOB.

However, when I attempted to setup VCF SSO, I ran into the following message: The identity source configuration is managed by another VCF Operations console.

The new VCF Operations instance would not allow me to configure VCF SSO as it knew the vCenter Server was managed by a different VCF Operations ... which I thought would be resolved with the re-deployment.

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