In an air-gapped or disconnected environment, license entitlement for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) involves a multi-step file exchange between the VCF Business Service Console (BSC) and your deployed VCF Operations instance.

Below is a visual that outlines the workflow between VCF BSC (red) and VCF Operations (orange):

Note: This workflow is also applicable to VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) deployments as well.

For organizations managing multiple VCF Fleet deployments, automation is essential to operating at scale. Back in September, I had written a blog post that demonstrated some of the VCF Operations APIs that can be used to address the orange boxes above, but that was only half the solution.

However, the steps outlined in the red boxes were not covered and a recent question came up on whether those operations could also be automated?

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The number of objects and metrics collected by VCF Operations in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 plays a critical role in determining the size and scale of your VCF Fleet.

Using the VCF Operations UI, you can navigate to Administration->Control Panel->Cluster Management to view the cluster management-level stats but this only provides a subset of all the collected objects and metrics from the VCF Operations Adapters.

To get a more comprehensive understanding of all objects and metrics broken down by each adapter, you need to navigate to Administration->Cloud Proxies and iterate through each adapter as shown in the screenshot below.

It is not really scalable to use the VCF Operations UI to manually aggregate the total number of objects and metrics being collected, instead we can automate this by using the VCF Operations API!

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After completing the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Workload Domain Import workflow, I realized it would be helpful to be able to view the pre-check validations outside of the VCF Operations UI, especially if there are multiple pre-checks that have failed.

While the VCF Operations UI provides a good overview of all pre-checks, it does not provide any filtering or sorting, so you have to skim scroll through the entire list (55 in my case) to see which ones failed. For each failed validation, you can get more details including the recommended remediation, but you need to expand each section which can be painstaking if you have more than a few failures.

This is where we can leverage the power of automation and the VCF APIs ...

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