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Running VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) on Apple macOS

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The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Download Tool (VCDT) is how users download both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VCF) install and upgrade binaries, which can then then be hosted locally as a VCF Offline Depot.

VCFDT is only supported on a Windows or Linux-based operating system, which is a shame since I am exclusively an Apple macOS user 😞

If you attempt to run VCFDT on macOS (x86 or Apple Silicon), you will come across the following error message: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error


As you can see from the screenshot above, it attempts to use the Java runtime that has been compiled for Linux, which is denoted by the lin64 directory.

After poking around the VCFDT startup script, I saw that you could set your own custom JAVA path, which gave me an idea ...

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk.

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Programmatically interact with the Broadcom Product Lifecycle Portal

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Happy New Year! 🎉 Kicking off 2026 with my first blog post of the year 😁

Customers can use the Broadcom Product Lifecycle portal to search for products across the seven Broadcom Software Divisions and view their current support status: Supported, Unsupported, End of Service (EOS), or End of Life (EOL).

While the product lifecycle portal is straightforward to use, there are customer use cases for retrieving this information for automation purposes, such as updating an internal change management database (CMDB) to performing an inventory of your deployed Broadcom software to understand which versions might could be affected from a support standpoint.

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Automating License Entitlement Workflows between VCF Operations & VCF Business Service Console (BSC)

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In an air-gapped or disconnected environment, license entitlement for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) involves a multi-step file exchange between the VCF Business Service Console (BSC) and your deployed VCF Operations instance.

Below is a visual that outlines the workflow between VCF BSC (red) and VCF Operations (orange):

Note: This workflow is also applicable to VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) deployments as well.

For organizations managing multiple VCF Fleet deployments, automation is essential to operating at scale. Back in September, I had written a blog post that demonstrated some of the VCF Operations APIs that can be used to address the orange boxes above, but that was only half the solution.

However, the steps outlined in the red boxes were not covered and a recent question came up on whether those operations could also be automated?

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