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Automating the Retrieval of VCF Installer Deployment Milestones

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When deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) instance, whether converting an existing vSphere based environment or deploying a net new setup, the VCF Installer provides a graphical view of the current milestones and the individual tasks within each milestone.


While you likely will not sit and watch the progress of each step, you may want to retrieve the the progress programmatically, which can be accomplished by using the VCF Installer API.

Similar to the VCF Installer UI, we can also retrieve the individual milestones and get some additional useful information such as the start and end time for a given milestone. This can be handy if you want to understand how long each milestone is taking, which is not a view you can quickly find in the UI. To understand the duration for a given milestone with the UI, you need to look at the first and last task to understand the milestone duration.

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Cross vCenter vMotion workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0

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While vSphere 7.0 officially reached end of support in October 2025, many organizations continue to operate on it, often not by choice, and on hardware that is likely end of life.

An established transition strategy among enterprises is to migrate workloads into a newly deployed environment using the battle tested vSphere vMotion capability.

A lesser known capability introduced with both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 allows non-disruptive migration of workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0, as the minimum supported version of the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is 7.0 as you can see from VDS creation workflow wizard.


Users currently have two supported methods for migrating workloads from their existing vSphere 7.0 environment into either a VVF or VCF 9.0 deployment using the native Cross vCenter vMotion capability.

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Modern Kubernetes Visualization using Radar

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Over the years, many graphical user interfaces have appeared for Kubernetes, but only a few continue to be actively maintained and developed. While I prefer the standard kubectl CLI for basic interactions with a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster, a visual representation can be extremely helpful for troubleshooting and debugging.

Headlamp was my go to UI tool for k8s, which provides a simliar user experience to many of the previous Kubernetes visualization tools, nothing fancy but it gets the job done.

I recently discovered another OSS Kubernetes visualization tool called Radar, which aims to fill some of the gaps left by existing tools on the market. I was a bit skeptical as this could just be another "modern" tool until the next one is built, but I figured I would give it a try!


At first glance, it has a much cleaner, modern look and feel after I connected it to my vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) cluster. The homepage provides a summary of all the expected datapoints including versioning, resource utilization, deployment details, and the health of components and workloads.

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