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VCF 9.1 - New HTTP Offline Depot Support for VCF Installer & Fleet Depot Service

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VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 introduced the concept of a unified VCF Software Depot, which can connect to either Broadcom’s online repository or an offline depot that is hosted within an organizations environment.

By default, an offline VCF Software Depot requires HTTPS with basic authentication. In VCF 9.0, HTTPS can be disabled using this workaround, which remains applicable in VCF 9.1, however, basic authentication is still required.

Note: If you do not or can not  setup a basic web server for your VCF Offline Depot, you can use this simple Python script to serve up depot locally from your desktop as long as its accessible by VCF Installer and/or VCF Fleet Depot Service.

With VCF 9.1, both the VCF Installer and the new VCF Fleet Depot Service support an offline Software Depot configured with HTTP and no basic authentication. To take advantage of this capability, you must use the VCF Installer API for the initial VCF Fleet deployment, which automatically applies the same configuration to the Fleet Depot Service.

Note: The VCF 9.1 Installer UI currently does not support connecting to an offline VCF Software Depot using HTTP, the VCF Installer API must be used to apply this configuration.

If you accidentally used the VCF 9.0 workaround, you will need to reapply the HTTP configuration after the VCF Fleet has been deployed using the new VCF Fleet Depot Service API.

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Disable HTTP Range Requests on Synology WebStation, Apache or Nginx

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I use my Synology NAS to host a variety of services including a web server, file server and a backup system. As part of some testing that I had been performing with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, I needed to ensure that my web server does not respond to HTTP Range Requests, which allow clients to retrieve specific byte ranges rather than downloading an entire resource in a single transfer.

We can check whether a web server supports HTTP Range Requests by specifying a range of bytes as demonstrated in this cURL example below:

curl -H "Range: bytes=0-10" -I http://depot.vcf.lab/PROD/vsan/hcl/lastupdatedtime.json -u $CREDS


You should receive an HTTP 206 response which indicates HTTP Range Requests is supported by your web server, which my Synology supports by default.

Unlike a traditional web server where disabling HTTP Range Requests is pretty straightforward, modifying the default behavior for Synology WebStation is slightly more complicated. After some trial and error, I was able to successfully disable HTTP Range Requests on my Synology system, and for those with a similar requirement, the following sections outline the steps for several popular web server backends.

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Quick Tip - Establish trust between VCF 9.0 & 9.1 Installer and VCF Offline Depot w/self-sign TLS certificate

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For lab purposes, when configuring a VCF 9.0 or 9.1 Offline Depot, you can streamline the infrastructure setup by configuring the VCF Installer to use HTTP instead of HTTPS, which is the default configuration from the VCF Installer.

Alternatively, if you decide to use the system default which will expect the VCF Offline Depot to be served over HTTPS, you might be using a self-signed TLS certificate. If you attempt to connect to your offline depot with the VCF Installer, you probably will hit the following error as the TLS certificate is not trusted by the VCF Installer, which is expected.


In VCF 5.x, the workaround was to import your TLS certificate chain into SDDC Manager's certificate store which would then allow the trust to be established.

The exact same solution is required for the VCF Installer, but the path to the certificate store has changed.

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