VCF on VxRail and OBTU

[Arno Kattenpoel Oude Heerink]

Just want to highlight the complete lack of support and knowledge with VCF on VxRail within Broadcom and Dell.

Since introduction of 5.2.0.0 there is now a supported way for an offline depot, instead of hacking one together with William Lams blog post. 

This is now documented @ VCF Offline Depot deployment (broadcom.com)

However now running into the issue that the Janitor they hired to code OBTU completely forgot to include any http proxy possibility for downloading the offline depot. So I cannot download it with my DMZ machine which only way to the outside world is a http proxy. This creates an additional step to get a machine with complete internet access to download the depot, then get a waver from security to push that data to the DMZ machine, and then SDDC can pull that data. 

Guess what, a customer with a Darksite has a proxy for a DMZ machine with a reason. Why would 1 command within OBTU take a http proxy but another like download offline depot not, this should be globally available. Or even better follow the OS, most corporations use OS management and already have a proxy set.

And then the lack of manually entering the passwords for the depotuser and the partnerdepotuser.. Why should I put my personal passwords on a dedicated machine in a text file.

Broadcom guys please talk to Dell, and maybe next sprint we see a OBTU that is working for a real darksite not a simulated testsite with full internet access. 

Ohyeah comes more to mind, and it doesn't stop there. So not using a depot and using the original intended way for OBTU. IE: downloading the partner bundles. Copying, and then "uploading" (should call it import, but what the heck every body these days is running a private cloud so uploading is the word of choice I suppose.) Is not working at all. latest OBTU is erroring out on SDDC 5.2.1.0 with an API call to upload the metadata. This all feels so Alpha, this just is not funny anymore.

Bad part is customers with a real darksite have to have workarounds for vendor workarounds. I really hope this changes in the future. Seeing the releases for OBTU span multiple months I don't see this fixed any time soon.

Seeing almost no posts about OBTU I don't think allot of people hit this issue and might be a niché thing but this is very frustrating.

[MarcLang]

I totally agree. Spent some time with obtu and the broadcom support and then gave up exasperated. 

[NickF123]

Yep, the OBTU tool is a joke but it's Dell responsibility rather than Broadcom's and I assume it's just going to get worse post-VMware acquisition. We had one upgrade stall as one update they'd made to it introduced an undocumented restriction that you couldn't have a number in the domain part of your SDDC Manager FQDN for the upload. To be fair they fixed it pretty quickly but it still cost us a few days and a lot of time wasted thinking the issue was on our side (the logs weren't helpful).

We were interested in switching to using offline depots to (a feature I've been requesting for a couple of years) but the lack of consideration for VCF on VxRail needing a Dell offline depot is frustrating to say the least (but not surprising). Pretty sure any future dark-site VCF deployments we may do won't involve VxRail...