By default, SDDC Manager uses the online VMware Depot for downloading all software updates (security, patch, upgrade) for life-cycling a single VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) instance. SDDC Manager can also support air-gapped or disconnected environments by leveraging the VCF Offline Bundle Transfer Utility (OBTU), which my colleague Eric Gray recently published a detailed blog post demo'ing OBTU.
While a solution exists for managing an air-gapped VCF environment, the process can be time consuming if you have to support multiple VCF environment as you need to transfer all VCF bundles from where the OBTU is running to each individual SDDC Manager. Ideally, you vi just host your own offline VCF Depot that all SDDC Managers can simply point to, similar to what is used by vCenter Server with the their Update Manager Download Service (UMDS).
Luckily, an offline depot is not a foreign concept for VCF and while researching this topic, I was even pointed to this old 2020 blog post in creating your own local VCF 3.x depot, but the process was out of date and more importantly, OBTU was not available at the time.
By leveraging a combination of OBTU and the 2020 blog post, I was able to come up with an updated process to create an offline VCF depot that could be used by multiple VCF environments. I was able to successfully validate my offline VCF depot by applying the latest VCF 5.1.1 update to my existing VCF 5.x environment!
