Using the VCF Download Tool on Windows Subsystem for Linux to download VCF 9 binaries

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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.

  1. First, download the VCF download tool from the Broadcom support website. It’s packed as a tar.gz file.
  2. 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?).
  3. 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 first

    tar -xvf vcf-download-tool-9.0.0.0.24703747.tar.gz -C /path/to/folder/
  4. Now, navigate to the /bin subfolder within the extracted folder 
    cd /path/to/folder/bin
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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
  8. 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 🙂

Back to the Mothership!

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My last blog post was from February 2024. That was over a year ago (at the time of this blog post, which you are currently reading). Far too long! And now I’m writing a new blog post titled “Back to the Mothership.” What does that mean?

I’m glad you asked.

What happened?

Towards the end of March, I lost my job. I was laid off. It was quite a surprise and also a bitter disappointment. Especially when there had been no prior warnings or any discussions with the boss or anything like that. And especially when the Outlook invitation was “Personnel / Goal Setting” (that sounds promising, right?). And when someone from HR is also in the meeting room, you can put two and two together.

But that’s in the past now. I’m over it. Done and forgotten (but not forgiven). I will miss the team I was privileged to lead there. Including me, half the team has resigned or was resigned within three weeks.

Wow, bummer, what now?

I have spent a lot of time with my family in the last two months since I was laid off, spending a lot of time with my son and my wife. And I’ve also been able to get a lot of things in and around the house in order. So I cleaned all the windows (finally, once again after a few years), repaired the robotic lawnmower and gave it a new garage, and did a lot of those little things that take time and that I’ve been putting off until now.

But I also took time to figure out what I really wanted professionally. I enjoyed some good discussions with my wife (she is an emergency doctor, so she knows urgent and special situations), and also with good friends about my situation. What are my strengths? What skills do I have? What is my expertise? Is computer science (well, I mean the big IT), especially the field of virtualization and technology, still my passion? And the answer to this last question is clearly “YES”.

And what’s that with the Mothership now?

Now I can let the cat out of the bag, since the contracts are signed. I’ll be starting a new position as a Senior System Engineer in the VCF stream at the company “soulTec” on June 2nd. I will work a lot with everything related to vSphere, datacenter, a lot of customer projects, both onsite and remote, and I will learn a lot! I’m so excited and anxious, I can’t wait to show up at the office for the first time on Monday.

Technology with passion!

An ode to joy – or why you don’t have to mourn the free ESXi

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An ode to joy, or why you don’t have to mourn the free ESXi. An obituary.

But before I go into depth here, I would like to declare the following:

This blog post is reflecting my personal opinion. Based on my knowledge and experience, as well as the things I have read on the internet and heard from people directly and discussed with them, I have written this blog post.

The title of this blog post says a lot. At least I think so. And I’m glad you stumbled across this blog post or clicked the link wherever it has been posted. In the last few days, there has been a lot of reading about the fact that VMware by Broadcom has canceled the free ESXi hypervisor. And yes, that may not be the fine English way to mash such a product. I don’t even know if there is a “good” way to do something like that.

Yes. It’s bad that the “free ESXi” has been canceled. At least according to what I read about on X (Twitter) and some IT news portals. People were (and still are) angry about this move of thinning out the product portfolio. I never used this free version, and I wasn’t even aware that this was such a big thing. But that doesn’t count here.

Yes. There are alternative hypervisors, like Hyper-V, Proxmox, and others, and they are free. You can run virtual machines even on storage systems like TrueNAS or Unraid (the last one does cost some bucks). And a free hypervisor, I don’t care about the flavor, might be just enough for some people. They may run a homelab with some VMs, maybe some production services for their home network like Pi-Hole, to name one.

But this is it.

Read more

Happy New Year 2024

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Last year I didn’t write such a Happy New Year blog post. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t had the time, or I just wasn’t in the mood. Or maybe a combination of both (and/or more factors).

Over the last two years I have had the joy and honor of celebrating some personal firsts:

  • I earned my first VMware VCP certification
  • I married my girlfriend
  • We built a house (we moved together earlier, but that wasn’t part of the past two years)
  • We became parents
  • We still have cats (ok, not a first, but the cats wanted to be mentioned here too…)
  • And some other things

To be honest, I don’t know why im listing these things here. Maybe these (and some other things) were more important than blogging. Well, I would even bet that they were for sure more important than blogging. I’m usually sharing only tech things here, mainly focusing on virtualization, and some times cloud, but rarely personal things and thoughts. So, that’s then a “personal first” too I think.

But anyway. Back to topic.

I hope that your wishes come true and that you find the courage to take new steps. For 2024, I wish you and your loved ones all the best. And I hope to see you soon!

Happy New Year!

My Top 10 Posts in 2023

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Another year is coming to an end, it’s 2023 and the beginning of another year. With this blog article, I’d like to present to you my Top 10 posts of 2023. Surprisingly, the Top 10 blog posts are not all from this or last year. Obviously, people are still searching for solutions for problems they have with some “old” stuff, or they are looking for solutions to problems they have in their current infrastructure. I hope that my blog posts will help the people out there in the tech community solve their problems. I’ll do my best to keep on doing my work and sharing my knowledge.

10. How to add a new host to a vSAN cluster

During late summer this year I did some vSAN experiments in my homelab. Three blog posts about vSAN made it into the top 10 of 2023. The linked blog post shows you how to add a new (an additional) ESXi host to your vSAN cluster.

https://www.driftar.ch/2023/08/15/how-to-add-a-new-host-to-a-vsan-cluster/

9. VMware – Clone a VM with snapshots (and consolidate it)

Some “vmkfstools” adventure to recover a VM that had a snapshot that wasn’t cleanly deleted.

https://www.driftar.ch/2018/09/03/vmware-clone-a-vm-with-snapshots-and-consolidate-it/

8. Backup and Restore vCenter Server Appliance

This blog post covers the backup and recovery of the vCenter server appliance. An easy-to-follow guide.

https://www.driftar.ch/2020/04/21/backup-and-restore-vcenter-server-appliance/

7. My homelab hardware gets its own rack

Well, at least the Tweet I published for this blog post has (as per December 2023) more than 24’000 impressions. It looks like people like hardware, and also DIY stuff.

https://www.driftar.ch/2020/09/26/my-homelab-hardware-gets-its-own-rack/

6. Changing FRU information on Supermicro servers

Probably worth a rewrite or at least an update. But back in the days I had an issue with one of my Supermicro servers. The information stored in the BIOS were not correct. This blog post shows you how to fix this by flashing the correct information into the BIOS.

https://www.driftar.ch/2021/10/08/changing-fru-information-on-supermicro-servers/

5. “Starting drivers, please wait” – An HPE adventure story

This was one strange issue! Back in the day when I was working at a solution provider, a customer reported an issue. His ESXi hosts have lost connectivity to a storage system. It took some time to solve, and it was a good experience.

https://www.driftar.ch/2017/07/18/starting-drivers-please-wait-an-hpe-adventure-story/

4. How to reset the ESXi root password?

It is sometimes necessary to reset the ESXi root password. The “officially” supported way to reset the ESXi root password is to reinstall the host from scratch. But the magic in this blog post is called “host profiles”.

https://www.driftar.ch/2022/08/17/how-to-reset-the-esxi-root-password/

3. How to shut down a vSAN cluster – and start it again

One of three blog posts related to vSAN made it to the third place of 2023. How to shut down the vSAN cluster and start it again, properly.

https://www.driftar.ch/2023/08/10/how-to-shut-down-a-vsan-cluster-and-start-it-again/

2. An easy way to quickly migrate a VMware VM to Synology VMM

On the second place of 2023, there is this post on how to quickly migrate a VMware VM to the Synology Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).

https://www.driftar.ch/2020/09/01/an-easy-way-to-quickly-migrate-a-vmware-vm-to-synology-vmm/

1. How to remove a host from a vSAN cluster

And the first place winner for my Top 10 blog posts in 2023 another vSAN blog post! It shows you how to remove a host from a vSAN cluster.

https://www.driftar.ch/2023/08/15/how-to-remove-a-host-from-a-vsan-cluster/