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VCF 9.1 - Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) & VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) Nested Lab Deployment

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Nested ESX continues to be a popular way to explore and learn about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), it is also the basis for the VCF Holodeck solution.

With the release of VCF 9.1, Nested ESXi VMs can now run on physical hosts with NVMe Tiering enabled, no workarounds required. In addition, you can extend the benefits of NVMe Tiering to a Nested ESX VM by applying the following VM Advanced Setting.

The easiest and quickest way to deploy a Nested ESX VM is to my Nested ESX Virtual Appliance, which has been refreshed for 9.1!

Note: The latest Nested ESX 9.1 Virtual Appliance no longer comes with default password, you will need to specify that as part of the OVF deployment.

While I have personally switched from using a nested VCF deployments to physical setup, mainly due to lack of resources, I know many of you do have sufficient capacity to run a full VCF deployment in a Nested environment.

I have also refreshed my VMware Cloud Foundation Nested Lab (VCF) Fleet Deployment script to support both VCF and VVF 9.1


Here is a screenshot of the initial deployment that takes ~25 minutes to deploy three Nested ESX VM, initialize the VCF Installer, sync from a VCF Offline Depot, generate the deployment JSON and then automatically start the VCF Fleet deployment. 😎

VCF 9.1 - Unable to fetch plugin metadata for VCF Consumption CLI

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I recently came across an issue while syncing the VCF Consumption CLI plugins, it would always show the following attempting to fetch 9.0.1 plugin even though my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF environment was already at 9.1.

> vcf plugin sync

[i] The vcf cli essential plugins have not been installed and are being installed now. The install may take a few seconds.
[i] Installing plugins from plugin group 'vmware-vcfcli/essentials:v9.0.1'
[x] Failed to install plugin 'telemetry:v9.0.1'
[!] unable to install plugin 'telemetry': unable to fetch the plugin metadata for plugin "telemetry": unable fetch plugin binary: Collecting images: GET https://projects.packages.broadcom.com/v2/vcf/vcf-cli-plugins/ga/vmware/vcfcli/darwin/amd64/telemetry/manifests/v9.0.1: MANIFEST_UNKNOWN: The named manifest is not known to the registry.; map[manifest:vcf/vcf-cli-plugins/ga/vmware/vcfcli/darwin/amd64/telemetry]

[!] No active contexts available to perform plugin sync

After reaching out to Engineering, I came to learn that the behavior of the VCF Consumption CLI in 9.1 has changed and no longer pulls from the Broadcom public repository. Users can either download the VCF Consumption Plugins and relocate the OCI images into their own container registry or for an air-gapped environment, the plugins can also be installed locally.

I opted for second option for simplicity sake even though I do have Harbor Container Registry running.

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VCF 9.1 - Updated VCF Design Blueprints & VCF Fleet Latency Diagrams for VCF Architects

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 is now generally available! 🥳

In addition to the revamped VCF 9.1 Technical Documentation which includes the 9.1 release notes, which everyone should be reviewing in detail, we have released a number of new resources for our VCF architects and practitioners to help you on your 9.1 journey! 🧠

VCF Design Blueprints

ℹ️ Direct URL link to the VCF Design Blueprints

In addition to refreshing the VCF Fleet Design Blueprints for 9.1, we now have VCF Blueprints spanning a number of topics across: Edge, Fleet Management, Monitoring, Alerting, Troubleshooting, Workload Consumption, Lateral Security, Data Protection, Disaster and Cyber Recovery!

  • Infrastructure Modernization
    • VCF Fleet in a Single Site with Minimal Footprint
    • VCF Fleet in a Single Site
    • VCF Fleet with Multiple Sites in a Single Region
    • VCF Fleet with Multiple Sites Across Multiple Regions
    • VCF Fleet with Multiple Sites in a Single Region plus Additional Region(s)
    • VCF Fleet Management
    • VCF Monitoring & Alerting
    • VCF Troubleshooting
    • VCF Edge for Single Node with ArgoCD
    • VCF Edge for Government & Defense
    • VCF Edge for Manufacturing
  • Application Modernization
    • VCF Self-Service Multi-Tenant Private Cloud Consumption
    • VCF vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Consumption
    • VCF Private AI Services Consumption
  • Security Modernization
    • VCF Lateral Security with vDefend
    • VCF Component Backup and Restore
    • VCF Instance Backup and Restore
    • VCF Fleet Disaster Recovery
    • VCF Cyber Recovery

VCF Fleet Latency

ℹ️ Direct URL link to the VCF Fleet Latency Diagram

The VCF 9.0 Fleet Latency Diagram has been an extremely popular resource since its release with VCF Architects and Practitioners. With the new VCF 9.1 constructs that were introduced, the VCF Fleet Latency Diagram has also been updated and is part of the 9.1 release which you can access by going to the ports.broadcom.com and navigating to Network Diagrams section.