Step-by-step VMware Cloud Foundation Repository update without Internet

In my previous post Step-by-step VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2.1 install using VLC we finished building our management domain successfully. Now in order to install vRealize suite we need to download the bundles from VMware, If you have direct internet connectivity (connection to depot.vmware.com) open for SDDC manager then you just need to authenticate with my.vmware.com account and it will start polling and downloading the packages.

If your SDDC manager do not have direct connectivity option, then there could be two scenarios.

1. Either a proxy server in place using which updates/bundles can be downloaded.
2. Environment is air gapped and only option is to offline bundle download and updating repository manually.

Access Denied SSH SSDC manager despite entering correct password

Most often we face an issue where we try to login any photon OS appliance using ssh but we get error access denied, now if the error is due to no access then solution is to provision access, however if the account has access and you are entering correct password still you are getting this error then you must consider that the account might have been locked due to failed login attempts.

Step-by-step VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2.1 install using VLC

In my previous post Step-by-step VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2.1 install I scrapped the lab we started for VCF 4.2.1 and now is the time we continue it with Lab constructor. It would be an injustice if I do not mention Tom Stephens(VMware)'s name who introduced VLC to me, and made my life easier.

In order to start with it we need to review the pre-requirements. You need a single physical host running ESXi 6.7+ with 12 cores, 128 GB RAM and 800 GB SSD.

Configure vSphere standard switch, create a trunk port group and set the switch MTU to 9000 , in our case we already have the Nested-SDDC switch and nested-Trunk port group configured. Our trunk port group is inheriting security settings from the switch, where its configured to accept forged transmits, promiscuous mode and mac address change. Disable these settings on the switch level and configure on the port group nested-trunk, we are doing this for only VCF lab, once we are done with this we will revert it. I am also powering off the CSR1000v virtual router, until this lab is complete.