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Automating the Retrieval of VCF Installer Deployment Milestones

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When deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) instance, whether converting an existing vSphere based environment or deploying a net new setup, the VCF Installer provides a graphical view of the current milestones and the individual tasks within each milestone.

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While you likely will not sit and watch the progress of each step, you may want to retrieve the the progress programmatically, which can be accomplished by using the VCF Installer API.

Similar to the VCF Installer UI, we can also retrieve the individual milestones and get some additional useful information such as the start and end time for a given milestone. This can be handy if you want to understand how long each milestone is taking, which is not a view you can quickly find in the UI. To understand the duration for a given milestone with the UI, you need to look at the first and last task to understand the milestone duration.

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Cross vCenter vMotion workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0

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While vSphere 7.0 officially reached end of support in October 2025, many organizations continue to operate on it, often not by choice, and on hardware that is likely end of life.

An established transition strategy among enterprises is to migrate workloads into a newly deployed environment using the battle tested vSphere vMotion capability.

A lesser known capability introduced with both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 allows non-disruptive migration of workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0, as the minimum supported version of the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is 7.0 as you can see from VDS creation workflow wizard.

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Users currently have two supported methods for migrating workloads from their existing vSphere 7.0 environment into either a VVF or VCF 9.0 deployment using the native Cross vCenter vMotion capability.

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Installing Realtek Network Driver Fling using Free ESXi 8.0 Update 3e ISO

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The typical method for authoring a customized ESXi image that contains additional drivers and packages is by either using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) if you already have a vCenter Server deployed or by using PowerCLI cmdlets which does not depend on vCenter Server to to create a new image.

In the latter option of using PowerCLI, users must provide a reference to the ESXi base image which can be be provided by using Broadcom's Online Depot (requires Broadcom Download Token) or served using a local ESXi offline bundle zip file.

As some of you may have observed over the years, not every single ESXi release (typically patch/updates) will include both an ISO and offline bundle deliverable. If you have an existing vCenter Server, you can download ANY ESXi release in either ISO and/or offline bundle format using vLCM.

What if you only had access to an ESXi ISO, can you still take advantage of some of the custom drivers including the recently released Realtek Network Driver for ESXi Fling?

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