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VCF 9.0 Offline Depot using Synology

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There are number of methods to serve up the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 software binaries for hosting an offline depot from running a traditional web server as outlined in the official VCF documentation to running a simple 1-liner Python command to serve up the files directly to the VCF Installer.

If you happen to have a Synology in your lab, you can add the WebStation package and quickly setup a VCF Offline Depot without much hassle.

Note: To download the the required VCF 9.0 software binaries and metadata, you will need to use the new VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) and a valid Broadcom Download Token.

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Deploying VCF 9.0 on a single ESXi host?

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By default, the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Installer requires a minimum of 3 ESXi hosts when you select vSAN (OSA or ESA) for storage or 2 ESXi hosts when you choose to use external storage (Fibre Channel VMFS or NFS). When compared to VCF 5.x where vSAN was the only storage option and it required a minimum of 4 ESXi host, this is certainly a welcome change for our users.

With VCF 5.x, it was possible to deploy using just a single ESXi host for the VCF Management Domain and this question has certainly come up a few time since the GA of VCF 9.0 ...

So what happens when you only enter a single ESXi host into the VCF Installer?


As expected, we see a validation error stating that we have not met the minimum number of ESXi hosts ...

However, this is just the default behavior and of course this was something I had looked into early on with VCF Engineering, since this would be an extremely useful capability to allow our users to easily explore VCF 9 using the smallest number of ESXi hosts for lab purposes only, assuming you can meet the Minimal Resources to Deploy VCF 9.0 in a Lab.

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VCF 9.0 Single Sign-On (SSO) with Keycloak IdP

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As part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, users can now enable the new VCF Single Sign-On (SSO) capability, allowing true single sign-on across all components within the VCF solution. While modern IdPs such as Okta, PingFederate, Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft ADFS continue to be supported for Production deployments, users might want to play with the new VCF SSO capability within their lab environment that may not have external access or you may want to use an IdP that is self-hosted for learning purposes.


In addition to the IdPs listed above, you can also play with the new VCF SSO using a generic OIDC provider. Keycloak is an IdP that can be self-hosted within your own environment and works perfectly out of the box with VCF SSO and this blog post will show you how that set it up without relying on a hosted IdP solution!

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