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Quick Tip: How to Identify Which Kubernetes Cluster Owns a vSphere Container Volume (PV)

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I was recently cleaning up some orphaned vSphere Container Volumes and while I was able to compare the Persistent Volumes (PV) IDs against the ones currently in use by a couple of Kubernetes clusters, I wanted to be 100% sure before removing them, especially since I planned bulk delete using PowerCLI’s Remove-CnsVolume cmdlet.

You can view all provisioned vSphere Container Volumes in the vSphere UI by navigating to vSphere Cluster->Monitor->Cloud Native Storage->Container Volumes. In addition to the volume details, you also get access to all of the associated metadata and labels, very similar to what you would see using kubectl, which is quite nice!


While reviewing the PV IDs in the UI, I noticed an attribute named Kubernetes Cluster, which appeared to identify the Kubernetes (K8s) cluster that owned the volume. How do I find this Kubernetes Cluster ID?

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What Host Lifecycle Operations Are Available after Importing vCenter into VCF 9.x Fleet?

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) first introduced the Brownfield Import capability in VCF 5.2, making it easy for customers to onboard their existing vSphere environments into a VCF deployment. While the Brownfield Import capability had some limitations in earlier releases, it has seen significant enhancements since VCF 9.0 and now provides a native onboarding experience using either the VCF Installer or as a Day-N operation within VCF Operations.

While some customers may have the opportunity to deploy a brand new VCF 9.1 Fleet as part of a hardware refresh initiative, the vast majority will start by converting an existing vSphere environment into their initial VCF Management Domain and then import their remaining vSphere environments as VCF Workload Domains.

In addition to providing centralized visibility and lifecycle management (patching and upgrades) for imported environments, one of the most common question is around what host lifecycle operations can be performed after an environment has been imported into VCF.

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VCF 9.1 - Enabling High Availability for a Small VCF Management Services (VCFMS) Deployment

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When deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 Fleet, users specify either a Simple or High Availability (HA) deployment model along with the desired deployment size: Small, Medium or Large. Unlike components such as NSX Manager, VCF Operations and VCF Automation, where deployment size and availability are configured independently, VCF Management Services (VCFMS) determines its availability model based on the selected deployment size.

  • Simple
    • Small - 1 x Control Plane Node (4 vCPU & 10GB mem) + 3 x Worker Node (12 vCPU & 24GB mem)
  • High Availability
    • Medium - 3 x Control Plane Node (4 vCPU & 10GB mem) + 3 x Worker Node (24 vCPU & 48GB mem)
    • Large - 3 x Control Plane Node (8 vCPU & 12GB mem) + 4 x Worker Node (24 vCPU & 48GB mem)


While the Simple VCF deployment model is ideal for lab and proof-of-concept environments, it is also a good fit for smaller production environments. However, the only way to provide HA for VCF Management Services (VCFMS) using the VCF Operations Fleet LCM UI is by scaling up to either a Medium or Large deployment, which comes with additional worker nodes and increased resource consumption.

If only we had a way to enable high availability for a Small VCFMS deployment? 🤔

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