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While updating and testing my Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Lab Deployment Script to support the latest VCF 5.1.1 release, I came across a strange error message in the Cloud Builder UI about uploading the personality to SDDC Manager:

Failed to upload personality to SDDC Manager Failed to upload personality to SDDC Manager

It turns out with VCF 5.1.1, when you deploy using JSON deployment method, you need to explicitly define the property clusterImageEnabled, which determines if the VCF Management Domain will be deployed using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (VLCM) image based versus the legacy vSphere Update Manager (VUM) baseline under the clusterSpec specification.

"clusterSpec":
{
    "clusterName": "vcf-m01-cl01",
    "vcenterName": "vcenter-1",
    "clusterEvcMode": "",
    "clusterImageEnabled": true
}

Once I included the property with the desired value, I no longer ran into the issue and for anyone who is automating using Cloud Builder API, this will be a handy to be aware of.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1.1 was just released this week and it brings a number of new capabilities including the recently announced VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA solution. One feature that I was really happy to see get introduced is called "License Later" better known as evaluation mode, which will now allow users to deploy VCF with Cloud Builder without requiring the component license keys up front, which was the previous user experience.

From a hands on and/testing perspective, this will allow for more users to experience VCF and reduce the barrier to entry for those that want to play with the product. Speaking of hands on, I wanted to try out the new evaluation mode using my VCF Automated Lab Deployment script which I had just assumed you would leave the license fields blank within the deployment JSON file but that did not work. After speaking with VCF Engineering, I found that there is a new deployment parameter that must be appended to the JSON file if you are deploying VCF using the Cloud Builder API.

Once I added the configuration, the VCF deployment kicked off successfully!

Deployment JSON:

For deploying VCF using the Cloud Builder API, you will need to append deployWithoutLicenseKeys with a value of true and the all license fields can be left blank or omitted all together

deployWithoutLicenseKeys: true

Deployment Workbook:

For deploying VCF using the Cloud Builder UI, there is a new entry in the workbook called "License Now" which you can select No and leave all license fields blank.

I have already updated my VCF Automated Lab Deployment script to support the new evaluation mode with VCF 5.1.1 as I have already been asked about the capability from a few customers 🙂

For Workload Domain creation, you can also deploy with the new license later feature by adding the "deployWithoutLicenseKeys" parameter into your JSON specification. For an example, search for this parameter in the JSON example for the VCF Domain Creation API.