Not Understanding VCF Bundle Management (5.2)

[Wedginald]

I am running VCF 5.2.0.0. 

I am setting up an offline depot, which I have working and I have the bundles downloaded for 5.2.1.0 which all seems fine. 

I want to deploy Aria, but SDDC Manager is saying I don't have vRSLCM downloaded. So I ran the lcm-bundle-transfer tool and downloaded the INSTALL bundles for LCM into the depot. However they don't seem to have come up in SDDC Manager. 

Am I approaching this the right way or am I missing something?

[Mohammed Viquar Ahmed]

You mean to say u downloaded the VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle version 8.18 install image and still its not showing ? 

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Regards
Mohammed Viquar Ahmed
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[Arnaud Gandibleux]

I see similar behavior in 5.2 and 5.2.1. The offline depot has been setup correctly as I can see manifest etc on webserver, but when I configure offline depot via UI in the SDDCm, it's not showing me any bundles.
On the otherhand it's telling me that my SDDCm is on the latest version when I click on the SDDC Manager tab underneath Lifecycle management.

In rare cases after re-deployment of the SDDC manager, it's showing me bundles... it seems very random

[JUNIOR_MU]

Did you try to restart the LCM service in SDDC Manager? Perhaps you could try using this PowerShell script to manage packages in VCF:

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/313523/powershell-script-for-vmware-cloud-found .html

[Doug Baer]

I don't know if this is the same issue, but I found this thread when I experienced something similar and was scratching my head about what to do next. I think some of it stems from my misunderstanding of how the offline depot tool functions, so I figured sharing what I discovered and what worked for me might help even if it may be too late for the original poster. 

While creating my offline depot (I have VCF 5.2.1.0 installed currently and also want to install VRSLCM), I ran the following to create my depot under /var/www/html/offline_depot:

./lcm-bundle-transfer-util --setUpOfflineDepot \
  --offlineDepotRootDir /var/www/html/offline_depot \
  --offlineDepotUrl "https://YOUR_OFFLINE_DEPOT_URL" \
  --depotUser YOUR_ID@BROADCOM_SUPPORT \
  --depotUserPasswordFile ~/.online_depot_passwd \
  --sourceVersion 5.2.1.0

This told me that there were no bundles to download. 

While troubleshooting, I listed the available bundles with different sourceVersion options. When I used sourceVersion of 5.1.1.0 like this: 

./lcm-bundle-transfer-util --listBundles \
  --depotUser YOUR_ID@BROADCOM_SUPPORT \
  --sourceVersion 5.1.1.0

It showed me this

 which indicates that the VRSLCM 8.18 INSTALL bundle is flagged with product version 5.2.0.0.

I came to understand that the lcm-bundle-transfer-util tool, when provided with a sourceVersion, will download only the bundles needed to go from that version to the current version. That means that if I want a 5.2.0.0 bundle in my depot, I need to configure the depot to be able to service a source that is OLDER than the bundle(s) I want. 

To that end, I changed my setupOfflineDepot call above to use the prior version of VCF as its source:
  --sourceVersion 5.1.1.0

When I ran the updated command, it downloaded the VRSLCM 8.18 bundle and configured my depot to present it to SDDC manager and I was able to proceed with the install once LCM refreshed its inventory.

It is possible to pull down a specific bundle and edit a bunch of files to add a bundle to your depot as a one-off, but I want something simple. 

If nothing else, I hope this helps someone else who finds this thread like I did. 

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Advanced Services Architect | VCF Division
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