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Quick Tip - VCF 9.0 Versioning Scheme

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I was answering a question the other day from a customer who had noticed the way they had fetched the version of ESXi (vmware -vl) in the ESXi Shell had been deprecated with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, as you can see from the screenshot below.


This brought back some fond memories for me as this was a command I had used back in the original ESX Service Console as a quick way to retrieve both the version and release level for an ESX(i) host.

While the vmware utility can still be used with VCF 9.0, the replacement command-line argument for -vl is -r for release and here is an example of what that output would look like:


With VCF 9.0, VMware has introduced a new versioning model for its unified software releases. As a result, various means including utilities and APIs for fetching the software version has been updated to reflect the new versioning scheme.

The next obvious question you might ask, what is the new versioning scheme?

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Single Node VMware Avi Load Balancer with VCF 9.0 & VCF 9.1

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 continues to support one of the most popular and powerful load balancer, VMware Avi Load Balancer. When you deploy a new VMware Avi Load Balancer within a given VCF Domain, by default SDDC Manager will deploy three VMware Avi Controllers for high availability purposes.

For lab purposes, you may not need all three VMware Avi Controllers but there was no way to change the system default in earlier releases of VCF. With VCF 9.0, we now have way to deploy just a single VMware Avi Controller, which is fantastic for lab and testing purposes.

UPDATE (05/27/26) - This workaround is still applicable for VCF 9.1.0, there is variable called $vcf91 which is set to $true which will add an additional property that is required with VCF 9.1 and later deployments.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, use only within a lab environment.

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Initial Mikrotik router/switch configuration for VCF 9.0

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While a capable system like the Minisforum MS-A2 (see example BOM) is great for running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 in a lab, equally capable networking hardware is just as essential.

Depending on your requirements, there are a TON of networking options in the market from low-end enterprise to prosumer hardware. One popular brand of router/switches that I have seen many folks from the VMware community deploy is from MikroTik.


RouterOS, MikroTik's operating system that runs across all their devices, provides Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality, which is especially useful for a VCF lab environment.

My initial experience with some of MikroTik's consumer router/switches was not great as I did not realize Jumbo Frame support (MTU of 9000) was not a standard feature and while you can go larger than 1500 bytes on some devices, it was no where near the 9K that I was looking for.

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