VCF Operations has long supported the ingestion of custom metrics and data through custom management packs, typically created by 3rd party vendors. While users can build their own custom management packs, it was a non-starter for many due to the development background required.

The newly integrated VCF Operations Management Pack Builder provides a no-code solution that can connect to any REST-based API endpoint, making it trivial to bring in custom metrics and associating that with existing or new objects within VCF Operations.

My recent purchase of a Kasa Smart Plug for energy monitoring gave me the perfect opportunity to use the VCF Operations Management Pack Builder!

Long story short, Kasa does not provide any public APIs to access their smart devices, but the open-source community has reversed engineer their protocol and built a python library called python-kasa allowing users to interact with their Kasa smart devices.

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With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a new architectural construct has been introduced called a VCF Fleet. This brings centralized fleet management and provides modern workload consumption across multiple VCF instances, all managed through a single deployment of VCF Automation and VCF Operations, as shown in the diagram below.

A common question that has been coming up quite a bit lately is how many VCF Instances can a VCF Fleet support?

Technically, there is not a fixed number of  VCF Instances that can be managed by VCF Operations. As with with most things in our industry, the answer is "it depends" ...

Before we take a closer look at what "it depends" actually means, it is important to understand what is a VCF Instance?

A VCF Instance includes a VCF Management Domain and can include one or more VCF Workload Domains.

• VCF Management Domain includes the core SDDC components: vCenter Server, ESXi hosts, vSAN or other supported principal storage and NSX Manager) along with single instance of SDDC Manager and a VCF Operations collector.
  • SDDC Manager provides lifecycle management for all deployed core SDDC components within a VCF Instance
  • VCF Operations Collector provides inventory and metric collection within a VCF Instances, which is then sent to VCF Operations
• VCF Workload Domain, when deployed only includes the core SDDC components and all lifecycle management and operations is performed by the single instance of SDDC Manager

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