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VCF 9.1 - Updated Method to Reset Identity Broker from previously managed VCF Operations for VCF Single Sign-On (SSO)

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Over the weekend, I had to re-deploy a portion of my VCF 9.1 Fleet, including VCF Operations, VCF Management Services, VCF License Server, SDDC Manager and VCF Automation, due to some workflows I was testing.

Luckily, my core SDDC components vCenter, NSX and vSAN was not touched and I could simply re-use those components by running the VCF Installer Import/Converge process to quickly rebuild my VCF 9.1 Fleet!

Prior to deleting VCF Operations, I had VCF Single Sign-On (SSO) configured and I wanted to make sure the core SDDC components were properly cleaned up. I successfully ran through the VCF SSO unjoin operation for all components and cleaned up the vCenter Server Advanced Setting (config.OPERATIONS.vcf.sso.ops.cluster.id), which was required with VCF 9.0.x before you could add it to a new VCF SSO configuration.


After my VCF 9.1 Fleet was re-deployed, the first thing I wanted to go setup was VCF SSO and I noticed the configuration button was grayed out and it had the following message:

No VCF instance available due to one of the following: no existing instance, invalid license, version below 9.0, setup in progress, already configured via another Operations or running ELM.

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VCF 9.1 - Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) & VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) Nested Lab Deployment

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Nested ESX continues to be a popular way to explore and learn about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), it is also the basis for the VCF Holodeck solution.

With the release of VCF 9.1, Nested ESXi VMs can now run on physical hosts with NVMe Tiering enabled, no workarounds required. In addition, you can extend the benefits of NVMe Tiering to a Nested ESX VM by applying the following VM Advanced Setting.

The easiest and quickest way to deploy a Nested ESX VM is to my Nested ESX Virtual Appliance, which has been refreshed for 9.1!

Note: The latest Nested ESX 9.1 Virtual Appliance no longer comes with default password, you will need to specify that as part of the OVF deployment.

While I have personally switched from using a nested VCF deployments to physical setup, mainly due to lack of resources, I know many of you do have sufficient capacity to run a full VCF deployment in a Nested environment.

I have also refreshed my VMware Cloud Foundation Nested Lab (VCF) Fleet Deployment script to support both VCF and VVF 9.1


Here is a screenshot of the initial deployment that takes ~25 minutes to deploy three Nested ESX VM, initialize the VCF Installer, sync from a VCF Offline Depot, generate the deployment JSON and then automatically start the VCF Fleet deployment. 😎

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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