Over the holidays, I was testing some new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) upgrade flows in my lab environment, where I ended up bricking SDDC Manager, which was completely my fault! While I had backups for the majority of the VCF components, I realized I did NOT have any backups for SDDC Manager itself 😢

With VCF 9.0, I realized I could simply leverage the built-in VCF Converge/Convert workflow that can take my existing vSphere-based deployment and turn it into a new VCF Fleet!

After a couple of hours, a new VCF Operations instance was deployed along with a new SDDC Manager that is now managing my existing vCenter Server. Since this was a new VCF Operations instance, I needed to reconfigure VCF SSO, so that I could have common authentication across all VCF Components.

Note: Make sure you have uninstalled both the old SDDC Manager and VCF Operations vSphere UI plugin as well as unregistering the SDDC Manager extension using the vSphere MOB.

However, when I attempted to setup VCF SSO, I ran into the following message: The identity source configuration is managed by another VCF Operations console.

The new VCF Operations instance would not allow me to configure VCF SSO as it knew the vCenter Server was managed by a different VCF Operations ... which I thought would be resolved with the re-deployment.

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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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