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VCF 9.1 - Unable to fetch plugin metadata for VCF Consumption CLI

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I recently came across an issue while syncing the VCF Consumption CLI plugins, it would always show the following attempting to fetch 9.0.1 plugin even though my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF environment was already at 9.1.

> vcf plugin sync

[i] The vcf cli essential plugins have not been installed and are being installed now. The install may take a few seconds.
[i] Installing plugins from plugin group 'vmware-vcfcli/essentials:v9.0.1'
[x] Failed to install plugin 'telemetry:v9.0.1'
[!] unable to install plugin 'telemetry': unable to fetch the plugin metadata for plugin "telemetry": unable fetch plugin binary: Collecting images: GET https://projects.packages.broadcom.com/v2/vcf/vcf-cli-plugins/ga/vmware/vcfcli/darwin/amd64/telemetry/manifests/v9.0.1: MANIFEST_UNKNOWN: The named manifest is not known to the registry.; map[manifest:vcf/vcf-cli-plugins/ga/vmware/vcfcli/darwin/amd64/telemetry]

[!] No active contexts available to perform plugin sync

After reaching out to Engineering, I came to learn that the behavior of the VCF Consumption CLI in 9.1 has changed and no longer pulls from the Broadcom public repository. Users can either download the VCF Consumption Plugins and relocate the OCI images into their own container registry or for an air-gapped environment, the plugins can also be installed locally.

I opted for second option for simplicity sake even though I do have Harbor Container Registry running.

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Creating Custom Virtual Machine Classes using vSphere API

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Back in 2020, the vSphere UI was the only way to create your own custom Virtual Machine Classes, there was not a vSphere API and while you can directly connect to vSphere Supervisor Control Plane, it was not officially supported 🙂


With the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 2, the vSphere Automation REST API has been enhanced to include APIs for managing VM Classes.

A question recently came up about automating custom VM Classes. While the user referenced my earlier blog post, I realized I had not revisited this topic using the updated vSphere REST API. This was a great opportunity to provide a working example and timely, as I had just got access to Cursor.

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Frequent Query container volume async Tasks in vSphere UI 

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If you are running vSphere workloads that leverage Cloud Native Storage (CNS), whether through upstream or third party Kubernetes, vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), vSAN File Services, or VCF Automation (VCFA), you have likely noticed recurring "Query container volume async" tasks appearing in the vCenter Recent Tasks pane.


I have generally treated these as informational events and ignored them, but during a recent VCFA upgrade I had noticed an uptick in the frequency of these tasks and wanted to understand where they were coming from and whether I could reduce the frequency of these events.

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