After deploying the new VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Installer appliance, the first thing you must setup is the software depot which is where the VCF Installer will go to download the software binaries for deploying either VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
Users have two options to select from:
- Online Depot - Connect over the internet to Broadcom (directly or in-directly via network proxy), which will require a download token to be provided
- Offline Depot - Connect locally to a depot that you have setup (using the VCF Download Tool) within your own environment
By default, the VCF Installer connects to Broadcom's online depot using HTTPS, which is expected when connecting over the public internet. With that said, for an offline depot that is running within your own infrastructure, you can simplify the offline depot setup by serving the content over HTTP, which also removes the need to setup a TLS certificate for your web server.
To enable the VCF Installer to allow a non-HTTPS connection to your offline depot, you will need to add lcm.depot.adapter.httpsEnabled=false to following configuration file /opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-app/conf/application-prod.properties and then restart lcm service by running:
systemctl restart lcm
It should take a minute or so for the service to fully restart and when you reload the browser, you should now be able to enter your offline depot address that is not hosted over HTTPS as shown in the screenshot below:
If the offline depot can be accessed correctly, then it should start pulling the metadata and populating the list of binaries that you can then proceed to download.
If you want to quickly serve your content without setting up a full blown web server along with basic authentication, check out this blog post HERE which provides a simple Python script that can serve the VCF binaries using both HTTP and HTTPs!
In fact, this is how I have been deploying VCF 9.0 during development and after downloading the binaries, I just use this simple Python command to access the content over HTTP:
python http_server_auth.py --bind 172.30.0.100 --user vcf --password vcf123! --port 8888 --directory /Volumes/Storage/Software/VCF9
Without valid token, how do you fill the offline depot ? I have acces to the web portal and I can download each product but it doesn't work if I just upload each product on the web server.
You must have an active VVF/VCF entitlement to be able to deploy the software and setup the required depot including metadata (simply having the bits is not sufficient)