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Quick Tip - Establish trust between VCF 9.0 & 9.1 Installer and VCF Offline Depot w/self-sign TLS certificate

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For lab purposes, when configuring a VCF 9.0 or 9.1 Offline Depot, you can streamline the infrastructure setup by configuring the VCF Installer to use HTTP instead of HTTPS, which is the default configuration from the VCF Installer.

Alternatively, if you decide to use the system default which will expect the VCF Offline Depot to be served over HTTPS, you might be using a self-signed TLS certificate. If you attempt to connect to your offline depot with the VCF Installer, you probably will hit the following error as the TLS certificate is not trusted by the VCF Installer, which is expected.


In VCF 5.x, the workaround was to import your TLS certificate chain into SDDC Manager's certificate store which would then allow the trust to be established.

The exact same solution is required for the VCF Installer, but the path to the certificate store has changed.

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MS-A2 VCF 9.0 Lab: Configuring NSX Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

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This post is part of a short series that builds on our minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 deployment (2x Minisforum MS-A2) and showcases how to fully leverage the exciting new capabilities in the VCF 9 platform, all while maintaining a minimal resource footprint, which is ideal for lab and learning purposes.

In this blog post, we will walk through the configurations steps to enable NSX Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for our VCF 9 environment and demonstrate how to consume a VPC with your workloads.


I want to give a special shoutout to Dimitri Desmidt, who works in our Technical Marketing team and has been instrumental in helping me better understand NSX VPCs and how they work!

Here are some additional NSX VPC Resources that might be of interests if you would like to learn more:

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How to deploy VVF/VCF 9.0 using VMUG Advantage & VCP-VCF Certification Entitlement

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VMUG Advantage members who have recently earned their VCP-VCF certification are entitled to non-commercial VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licenses for personal use. When logging into the Broadcom Certification Portal, you may have noticed that only perpetual licenses for VCF 5.x are available, with no listings for VCF 9.0.

VCF 9.0 introduces a new keyless entitlement model, which requires some additional work on Broadcom's backend systems. While the delay in availability is not ideal, it is actively being worked on, and we hope to share an update in the very near future.

With that said that, I recently came up with a proposal that would at least allow existing VMUG Advantage members who have passed their VCP-VCF certification to start deploying VCF 9.0 and leverage the in-product 90 day evaluation period while the backend licensing is being sorted out.

The missing link that prevented users from deploying VCF is the fact that the VCF Installer also requires several metadata files, which is automatically retrieved when you have a Broadcom Support Entitlement, allowing you to generate a Broadcom Download Token.


Since VMUG Advantage members do not have a support entitlement, the quick workaround was to simply publish the the required VCF 9.0 metadata files. In addition, I have also included the folder structure within the download to further simplify the setup of a VCF Offline Depot, allowing users to deploy either a VVF or VCF 9.0 deployment.

Big thanks to the VCF Product, Engineering and Release Management for supporting this idea and rolling this out to our community while the longer term solution is being worked on.

UPDATE (12/08/25) - The new VMUG Advantage + VCP-VCF certification licensing is now available. You will need to authenticate into Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) and then open the following URL: https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/alpine-certificate which is where you will access both VCF 5.x and 9.x licensing and download tokens.

UPDATE (10/23/25) - It was shared on the VMware Community Podcast that the VCF 9.0 licensing for VMUG Advantage members w/their VCF Certification is planned to go live on Dec 8th! In addition, users will have the ability to generate download tokens and be able to go through the same experience as a user with support entitlements. The workaround posted here will no longer be required once the VCF 9.0 licensing has officially launched.

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