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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A useful feature in VCF Operations 9.0 is the ability to create a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Workload Domain from an existing vSphere environment, providing seamless onboarding into a VCF Fleet and getting access to the new VCF Fleet Management capabilities.

To access the VCF Import feature, navigate to the inventory view of your VCF Instance within VCF Operations and select Add Workload Domain->Import a vCenter Server to begin the workflow. A variety of deployment configurations are supported with VCF Import, you can refer to the official documentation for the complete list of requirement and minimum versions.

Deploying VCF 9.0 in a lab environment is an easy way to get hands on experience with this workflow. I recently installed ESX 9.0.1 onto a single ASUS NUC 15 Pro with a self managing vCenter Server for trying out the import scenario but I ran into the following pre-check error: Please ensure there is at least one cluster has more than 1 host

I guess I need to have more than one ESX host before I can proceed ... or do I? 🤔

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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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