WilliamLam.com

Simplify License Management across VCF Operations Fleet & Standalone Deployment for Monitoring

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Within a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 fleet, a single VCF Operations instance provides centralized license management and fleet management capabilities for all managed VCF instances.


That said, additional Standalone VCF Operations 9.0 instances can also be deployed for monitoring only use cases, which is a scenario that has been coming up more frequently with customers.

Although the VCF 9.0 Licensing documentation briefly references this supported use case, there is not much details on how this actually works. After getting a quick primer on this use case from fellow colleague Jared Burns and the VCF Licensing PM, I thought I would put together a quick blog post using some visuals I had created to help explain how this scenario can be setup.

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VCF Software Depot Structure Deep Dive for Install & Upgrade

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Before deploying a VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 environment, the VCF Installer must download the required VCF software binaries and metadata from either an online or offline depot, which can also support air-gapped environments.

One of the lesser-known enhancements in VCF 9.0 is the re-architecture of the VCF software depot into a new unified depot, which consolidates all VCF component binaries and metadata into a consistent, centralized structure.

While it is not necessary to fully grasp the structure of the new unified VCF Software Depot to deploy VCF, I’ve seen some confusion among users about which software binaries are required, both for the initial VCF Fleet deployment, VCF Fleet post-deployment installations and VCF Fleet upgrades. To help make these concepts concrete as well as help users create their offline depot, I will be sharing the specific VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) commands along with the files that are automatically downloaded for each scenario.

Perquisites:

Note: In my example, I have the following configured:

  1. flt-depot.rainpole.io is the FQDN of my offline depot, which is running on Ubuntu 24.04 (please ensure you are using supported operating system as noted above)
  2. BSP Download Token is stored in a file called /root/token which will be used by VCFDT
  3. Environmental variable is also configured called TOKEN which will also contain the same value of the BSP Download Token which will be used by UMDS
  4. At least 96GB of storage is required for all downloads and will be stored in the /depot directory

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Automated VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) 9.0 Lab Deployment Script

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After publishing my long awaited Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Lab Deployment Script yesterday, I already had a request for a simliar solution to deploy VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) environment.

Luckily, with new the VCF 9.0 Installer, it super easy to deploy either VCF or VVF, as VVF is just a subset of a VCF deployment. In fact, I had already incorporated this capability into the initial script, but I just did not get a chance to add the documentation for VVF as I know VCF has been the most popular request for this script.


I have updated my documentation to now include an example for deploying VVF as you can see from the screenshot below. It will automatically pull the required packages for VVF versus a VCF deployment and then proceed with deploying the components.


You can find all the details and documentation at the following Github repo: https://github.com/lamw/vcf-fleet-automated-lab-deployment