You may have read it here first, but I recently started a new job. And I’m going deep down the rabbit hole, the VMware Cloud Foundation rabbit hole. I recently sat my first VMware Cloud Foundation exam (VCF-VCP administrator) and passed. The needle for this had been in the arm for a long time if one can put it that way.
VCF version 9 has just been released recently too, and many people are trying to get it up and running in their homelab. And I’m no exception. Getting the stuff done is not as easy as it was back in the days with setting up the ESXi hosts, installing vCenter, and then configuring the vSphere environment as it should be (storage, vSAN, distributed virtual switches, etc.).
I’m also not yet quite sure if my whole homelab infrastructure (talking about the Supermicro servers here, and the HP workstation here) has enough resources. It should be enough when doing the math in terms of CPU cores, amount of memory, and storage. But when going deep technical, with CPU specs, etc., that might be a killer. We will see.
Installing the new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 9 has been simplified somewhat compared to version 5. There is now an installer available to be deployed as an OVA file, which then pulls all the required files (like ESXi installers, vCenter ISO, and all that stuff) automatically, either from an online depot or an offline depot. No matter which way you go, a valid download token is required to pull the installer files.
A quick word on the VCF download tool
The following guide should help you download the binaries from Broadcom through the VCF download tool, running in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). I’m assuming that you have already a WSL environment with a supported Linux version set up and running on your computer. The VCF download tool is designed to run on Linux. The only way to get it working on Windows is to use the WSL environment. Some information (not much, to be honest) is available here on the Broadcom support website: VCF Download Tool under Windows OS (broadcom.com).
A sidenote on the offline depot
One cool thing I stumbled across during my first steps is a blog post from William Lam, where he is setting up a Synology NAS as an offline depot. You may check this out if you have a Synology NAS, that would be a great fit for having the VCF 9 installer configured with this: VCF 9.0 Offline Depot using Synology (williamlam.com).
How to download the binaries with the VCF download tool
Let’s download the binaries with the VCF download tool within WSL.
- First, download the VCF download tool from the Broadcom support website. It’s packed as a tar.gz file.
- Upload the package to your WSL environment (if your WSL is running, you should see the mounted disk in Windows Explorer. Nice, isn’t it?).
- Next, switch to your WSL command line and extract the package to a folder somewhere on the disk.
Notice: You may have to create a folder firsttar -xvf vcf-download-tool-9.0.0.0.24703747.tar.gz -C /path/to/folder/
- Now, navigate to the /bin subfolder within the extracted folder
cd /path/to/folder/bin
- As mentioned earlier, a valid download token is required to download the binaries. Create a text document (downloadtoken.txt) somewhere on the disk and put your download token in one line. Only the token itself, nothing else. We will reference that file when issuing the download command.
- You may create a specific folder where the binaries will be stored, at least I’m referencing to such a folder in this guide.
Notice: Make sure you have enough free disk space on your Windows computer. - Next, still in the /bin subfolder of the extracted VCF download tool, execute the following command to start the download of the binaries:
./vcf-download-tool binaries download --vcf-version 9.0.0 --automated-install -d /path/to/downloadfolder/offline-bundles --depot-download-token-file /path/to/downloadtoken.txt
- If everything is configured correctly, you should get a notification to either enable or not the customer experience program. After that, the download should start automatically.
It should look somewhat like the screenshot below:
When I was downloading the binaries, something went wrong, and four downloads have failed. No worries if something like this happens. Just executed the same command again. The VCF download tool will start again, check what’s already downloaded, and also notice what failed to download. Only these binaries will be downloaded again:
After executing the download command again, all was fine:
One word to disk space. Shortly before the download starts, the VCF download tool will tell you how much disk space is needed, and will then immediately start downloading the binaries. So, really make sure you have enough “physical” disk space on your Windows computer, so that the WSL disk can automatically grow as needed.
Next, I’m going to prepare my Synology NAS as an offline depot and upload all the binaries to it. The ESXi hosts have been reinstalled from scratch already with ESXi 9, but have no configuration yet (except the DHCP IP address).
Bye for now 🙂