WilliamLam.com

Since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 back in May, customer excitement has been tremendous, with many deploying the latest release in their labs for evaluation and some even using it for pre-production environments. VCF 9.1 introduces a wide range of new capabilities, but experimenting with certain features can sometimes require supporting infrastructure that may not already exist in a lab environment, such as an OIDC provider for VCF Single Sign-On (SSO) or a web server to host VCF binaries.

I noticed a growing number of point solutions emerging within the community to simplify VCF deployments and make it easier to explore its capabilities in a lab environment. With the advent of AI, the barrier to entry has dropped dramatically, allowing more people with little to no programming experience to build useful tools.

I had been using ChatGPT and Gemini for quite some time but had not yet tried any of the newer agentic development tools, such as Claude Code or Cursor. Since I was already active in the OpenAI ecosystem, I decided to give Codex a try, especially given the rapid pace of development the platform was going through.

Here is a tweet from me on May 16, 2026 on my initial experience w/Codex:

Once you experience Agentic Dev ... 🤯

Had idea last night, wasn't taking it seriously. Ask Codex (free) to build me HTML prototype, it looked so good! Ask it to go further this morning, ran out of free request ... subscribed to Pro to continue pet project 😎

Future is wild! 🚀

— William Lam (@lamw) May 16, 2026

Here is a screenshot of the original HTML prototype that Codex generated from my initial requirements. Unfortunately, I no longer have the original prompt due to context compaction.

It took Codex roughly 15 minutes to go from a high-level prototype to a fully functional web application, something that would have taken me considerably longer to build on my own, especially given my limited web development experience.

Since I have some experience building virtual appliances, packaging the web application was straightforward once I gave Codex the deployment requirements. Over the past couple of months, I have continued iterating on this personal project as time has permitted, refining its capabilities and overall user experience.

Today, I am excited to introduce the VCF Infrastructure Services (VIS) Appliance, an Ubuntu-based virtual appliance that provides key infrastructure services to accelerate VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 lab and proof-of-concept deployments. VIS includes a user-friendly web management interface that enables users to quickly get started without requiring in-depth knowledge of the underlying services.

VIS is a small virtual appliance (2 vCPU, 4GB memory and 30GB storage) that currently supports the following services:

• Software Depot for hosting VCF software binaries
• SFTP Backup server for configuring VCF backups
• Container Registry for vSphere Supervisor and vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) workflows
• LDAP Provider for VCF Single Sign-On (SSO)
• OIDC Provider for VCF SSO
• DNS Server for lab hostname and reverse lookup records
• NTP Server for VCF appliances, ESX hosts, and supporting lab systems
• DHCP Server for appliance-managed lab network addressing
• Key Management Service for KMIP-compatible encryption workflows
• Shared TLS certificate management for all supported services

To learn more about VIS and to try it out for yourself, please visit: https://lamw.github.io/vcf-infrastructure-service-appliance/

The VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) is the recommended utility for downloading binaries for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployments and upgrades. However, because Express Patches (EPs) are versioned and released independently for each VCF component, determining the latest installation or upgrade binaries for a specific VCF release currently requires additional effort when using VCFDT.

The VCF Installer UI currently provides the best user experience by automatically determining the latest supported version of each component for a given VCF release (for example, 9.0.2 or 9.1.0) by parsing the productVersionCatalog.json manifest.

Using a similar approach, I created a small script called Get-VCFLatestComponents.ps1 with the assistance of AI that allows you to specify the target VCF release and whether you are performing an installation or upgrade. The script then generates the appropriate VCFDT commands to download the latest supported binaries.

The script requires the productVersionCatalog.json which can be downloaded using VCFDT (e.g. vcf-download-tool metadata download) or from the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) and then specify the following:

• DepotStore - The full path to where you want the binaries to be download to
• CredentialType - Either ActivationCode or DownloadCode
• CredentialFile - The full path to either the activation or download code file
• BaseVersion - 9.0.2 or 9.1.0
• Type - Either INSTALL or UPGRADE

Here is an example of running the script to generate the download binary commands for the latest VCF 9.1.0 release with latest EPs:

./Get-VCFLatestComponents.ps1 -PVC /Users/lamw/productVersionCatalog.json -DepotStore /Volumes/Storage/Software/VCF-LATEST -CredentialType ActivationCode -CredentialFile /Users/lamw/vcf_activation_code.txt -BaseVersion 9.1.0  -Type INSTALL

You can now copy the generated VCFDT commands and run them sequentially or placed them inside of a PowerShell or Shell script and have it run in the background 😎

An enhancement has already been planned for VCFDT, where a future maintenance release will support downloading the latest install/upgrade binaries for a VCF release, including all applicable Express Patches, using a single command. Until then, I hope this script saves you a few minutes and removes some of the guesswork when downloading VCF binaries.