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Creating an offline VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Depot for multiple VCF environments

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By default, SDDC Manager uses the online VMware Depot for downloading all software updates (security, patch, upgrade) for life-cycling a single VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) instance. SDDC Manager can also support air-gapped or disconnected environments by leveraging the VCF Offline Bundle Transfer Utility (OBTU), which my colleague Eric Gray recently published a detailed blog post demo'ing OBTU.

While a solution exists for managing an air-gapped VCF environment, the process can be time consuming if you have to support multiple VCF environment as you need to transfer all VCF bundles from where the OBTU is running to each individual SDDC Manager. Ideally, you vi  just host your own offline VCF Depot that all SDDC Managers can simply point to, similar to what is used by vCenter Server with the their Update Manager Download Service (UMDS).

Luckily, an offline depot is not a foreign concept for VCF and while researching this topic, I was even pointed to this old 2020 blog post in creating your own local VCF 3.x depot, but the process was out of date and more importantly, OBTU was not available at the time.

By leveraging a combination of OBTU and the 2020 blog post, I was able to come up with an updated process to create an offline VCF depot that could be used by multiple VCF environments. I was able to successfully validate my offline VCF depot by applying the latest VCF 5.1.1 update to my existing VCF 5.x environment!

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Support my fundraising for Tour de Cure 2024

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It has been a LONG time since I have done any serious cycling, especially with two younger kids, I no longer have the luxury of riding for hours across the beautiful trails in the bay area. With that said, I have always had an itch to get back to some riding, mostly for recreational purposes, which is actually how my cycling journey began.

I recently came to learn that our VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) product leader, Paul Turner, is participating in an upcoming Northern California Tour de Cure to fundraise for the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and a VMware team had also been setup. At first, I was just planning to donate to this awesome cause, but then I realize this might be a good reason for me to get back into "some" cycling and I have decided to join team VMware!

I was also reminded that 10 years ago, I did my first (and last) century ride (100 miles) in the 2014 Waves to Wine for the National MS Society and many of my colleagues and readers had supported me in that cause and together, we raised over $6,200!

For the 2024 Tour de Cure fundraiser, I have set a slightly loftier goal to raise for the American Diabetes Association and I would like to ask for your support in helping me reach my goal by donating to this cause:

For those that donate, please check whether your employer provides any type of charitable matches, which would make your donations go even further! In fact, for any VMware employees who donate, I recently learned that we have a matching program up to $5K for 2024 and you an request a match going to the CyberGrants tile internally within our self-service application web portal to apply for a match for this or any other charitable donation you have made.

Thank you in advance to everyone who donates and if you are in the Northern Bay Area, feel free to join Team VMware and I will definitely be sporting my VMware Cycling Kit! 🚵

Power off VM from Guest OS Reboot capability in vSphere 8

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In 2019, a new VM advanced setting called vmx.reboot.PowerCycle was introduced and greatly simplified the remediation of CPU vulnerabilities for our customers. The operational challenge that came with applying CPU microcode updates was that all running VMs on an ESXi host would need to go through a complete power cycle (power off and power back on) before the guest operating system(s) would be fully protected.

The new VM setting would notify ESXi to convert a guest operating system reboot into a VM power cycle operation, which aligns nicely when an organization applies a guest OS update or patch and the guest OS is then rebooted afterwards. The benefit to our customers is that the remediation of CPU vulnerabilities can co-exists with an organizations existing maintenance window and the OS is remediated through a regular guest OS reboot. From the guest OS point of view, nothing has changed, it still sees a reboot but from the VM virtual hardware point of view, a complete power cycle has occurred. A very cool and innovative solution if you ask me!?

The reason for this background, there is another use case that has also been operationally challenging which is upgrading the VM Compatibility, also known as VM Virtual Hardware. A VM must be powered off before you can change the VM Compatibility and a simliar challenge arises with coordinating the downtime of a VM with application owners/teams. What if we had a simliar capability like the guest OS reboot triggering a power cycle, but instead of power cycling the VM, it would simply power it off?

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