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VCF 9.1 - Auditing VCF Management Services (VCFMS) IP Pool Usage 

06.17.2026 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

As part of deploying the new VCF Management Services (VCFMS) component, a pool of IP addresses is provided to support the automatic deployment and scale-out of additional worker nodes for Day-N services such as Log Management and Real-time Metrics. In addition, these IP addresses are also reserved for lifecycle operations such as node recovery, rolling upgrades and scaling out additional service replicas, all of which may require additional IP capacity.


While you can view the current IP allocations by logging into VCF Operations and navigating to Build->Lifecycle->VCF Management and selecting the VCF Services Runtime component (VCFMS), there is currently no high-level view showing how many IP addresses have been consumed relative to the configured IP address pool(s). This can make capacity planning difficult and leave users unsure when additional IP pools may need to be added.

With the help of the VCF Fleet LCM APIs, we can easily audit the IP usage for a given VCFMS deployment and generate a more friendly report

[Read more...]

Categories // VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSphere Foundation Tags // VCF 9.1

VCF 9.1 - Auditing vCenter Server Connections using the Connection Utilization API

06.15.2026 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

vCenter Server has had the ability to audit vSphere logins, whether through the API or UI, for nearly two decades using vSphere Events, which provide detailed information on who connected, when the login occurred and the client IP address associated with the session.

While looking up something in the latest vSphere 9.1 Automation REST API, I came across a new Connection Utilization API that provides visibility into all HTTP and HTTPS connections established with vCenter Server.

While most organizations deploy vCenter Server on a dedicated management network as a best practice, it does not eliminate the possibility of unexpected or unauthorized connections. Having additional visibility into those connections and the ability to audit them can help organizations quickly identify and investigate suspicious activity.

[Read more...]

Categories // VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere Tags // VCF 9.1, vSphere 9.1

Quick Tip: Resolving OVFTool "Failed to Send File" Errors on macOS

06.13.2026 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I frequently deploy and re-deploy VMware Virtual Appliances (OVA), which I fully automate using OVFTool from my macOS x86 system. Recently, I noticed that deployments would consistently fail roughly 3 out of 5 times with a generic error message like the following:

Deploying VCF Installer sddcm02 ...
Opening OVA source: /Volumes/Storage/Software/VCF910/PROD/COMP/SDDC_MANAGER_VCF/VCF-SDDC-Manager-Appliance-9.1.0.0.25371088.ova
The manifest does not validate
Opening VI target: vi://[email protected]/
Deploying to VI: vi://[email protected]/
Transfer Failed
Transfer Failed
Error: Failed to send file [sddcm02-2.vmdk] to the host [172.30.0.10], please check the network connection
Warning:
- The manifest is present but user flag causing to skip it
Completed with errors


While annoying 😩, I never really bothered digging into it because, after a few retries, the deployment would eventually succeed 😅

Even after upgrading to the latest OVFTool version 5.1.0 (supports VCF 9.1), the issue still continued to persist. I finally decided to enable verbose debugging during a failed deployment and reached out to OVFTool Engineering to see if they could help me understand what was happening, especially when it would eventually succeed!

[Read more...]

Categories // OVFTool

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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Recent

  • VCF 9.1 - Auditing VCF Management Services (VCFMS) IP Pool Usage  06/17/2026
  • VCF 9.1 - Auditing vCenter Server Connections using the Connection Utilization API 06/15/2026
  • Quick Tip: Resolving OVFTool "Failed to Send File" Errors on macOS 06/13/2026
  • VCF 9.1 - Are You Using the Correct ESXCLI Command to Enable NVMe Tiering? 06/12/2026
  • VCF 9.1 - OCuLink External Graphics (eGPU) Passthrough with vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) 06/12/2026
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