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Quick Tip - Workaround for failed VCFABinding for connecting VCF 9.0 Automation to Data Services Manager (DSM)

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I recently deployed the latest release of VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0 in my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 lab to explore the new integration with VCF Automation (VCFA), allowing organizations to enable a true Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) for their users.

While setting up the connection from VCFA to DSM, I ran into the following error:

VCFABinding CR is not ready in 50 seconds, with reason: VCFABinding CR is not ready: failed to create VCFA TM client: Get "https://auto01.vcf.lab:443/api/versions": tls: failed to verify certificate: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

From the error message, it looks like DSM is having an issue validating the self-signed TLS certificate from VCFA, which I figured most users would be using, especially within a lab environment.


After a bit of searching around, I came to learn this was a known issue mentioned in the DSM Release Notes and it pointed to this Broadcom KB 398007, that outlined the solution but it was still missing some details.

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Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Lab Setup

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I have been a huge fan of using the Minisforum MS-A2 to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, which has been a fantastic way to get hands-on experience with the latest release of VCF!

Best of all, it allows us to explore all the exciting new capabilities that VCF 9 has to offer, while balancing the required resources for a minimal footprint deployment!


Over the past couple of months, I have been performing extensive testing and validation of VCF 9 running on the MS-A2 and I have documented the full installation process that users can follow along in this Github repository:

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Custom UEFI Boot Menu for ESXi 9.0 using rEFInd

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Unless I am working with an unreleased version of ESXi, I usually install it by booting from a USB drive that includes an embedded Kickstart configuration file, that will fully automate the installation.

For a single ESXi host deployment, this workflow works great but if you have more than one host with different ESXi Kickstart configuration files, you will either need multiple USB drives or you have to keep updating the embedded Kickstart file reference using a single USB device.

There are a number of different ways to solve this problem, I have covered many of the solutions in my Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation at Scale session at VMware Explore.

With that said, since I have been deploying several Minisforum MS-A2 for use with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, I wanted to explore a solution that had been requested in the past but I never had the time to look into, which is creating a custom ESXi boot menu that would allow you to select specific ESXi version and/or kickstart configuration files.

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