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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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VCF Installer Deploying VVF Components with VCF Entitlements

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Despite its name, the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Installer can deploy both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) environments. Many users incorrectly believe the VCF Installer restricts you to only the specific product deployments that you have entitlements for, VVF deployment for VVF entitlements and VCF deployments for VCF entitlements.


The VCF Installer does NOT care nor has any knowledge of your license entitlements when performing a deployment. In fact, both VVF and VCF deployments will default to the 90 day evaluation period until the components are licensed by VCF Operations, which is performed by a user post-deployment to retrieve product entitlements.

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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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