Recently, I started preparing my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) home lab running 5.1.1, for an upgrade to VCF 5.2.1, I ran into an issue with upgrade bundles failing to download.

In SDDC Manager I would navigate to Lifecycle manager -> Bundle Management I kept seeing the download status error “Downloading Bundle Failed”

I also kept receiving an error in the header about an issue downloading the bundle “DepotConnectionFailureException: Error downloading bundle [/evo/vmw/bundles/bundle-133766.tar] from depot.vmware.com:443”

At first I thought it may have been DNS…(because it’s always DNS), but that URL seemed to resolve fine. I tried reconnecting the online depot, multiple times, with no luck. No matter what I tried, I just could not get SDDC Manager to download that bundle.

Then I found a glimmer of hope in a couple of KB articles.

The first KB 312173 article provided instructions. These were for removing old upgrade and install bundles to free up space on the NFS partition. I tried that out…and it did remove the bundle, however it still did not give me a resolution on the issue with the error when downloading the bundle…I still received the same errors.

Searching further, I found a second KB 313523. It provides a nice little menu-driven PowerShell script to help with VMware Cloud Foundation bundle management.

The requirements are Windows, Linux, or MacOS running PowerShell Core 7.3.0 or later, VMware PowerCLI 13.1 or later, and PowerVCF 2.3.0 or later.

A quick upgrade from PowerShell Core 5.1 to 7.4.6, and I installed the PowerVCF module on my Windows machine and I was ready to try this out. Invoke the script with the parameters:

.\VcfBundleManagement.ps1 -user administrator@vsphere.local -server sddc-l-01a.corp.internal -pass [password] -rootPass [password]

It runs a quick pre-req check, then connects to SDDCM, then loads the bundles…

Then loads this nice little menu:

I chose option 3, “Show the downloaded bundles”, and saw a download bundle had failed

Selecting “Enter” I went back to the main menu and then selected 5, “Delete a bundle”. I found and highlighted the bundle ID “d715084c-c989-4089-8571-6e353a49e5d4” and pasted it into the line below to delete, and hit Enter.

I had to verify “Are you sure you want to delete the selected bundles?” Uh, yes, please!

And after that, the bundle was gone.

Back at the main menu, I then initiated a new bundle download by selecting 8, “Download a bundle”

The bundle I need is the VMware vCenter Server 8.0 Update 3c, which is bundle ID dacab600-58b0-47b6-a995-f42055cf3885, so copy/paste again

And checking back into SDDC Manager, I can now see the bundle is now downloading successfully!

Thankfully, this seemed to solve my issue here, bundle download is working again. And I’ll get to upgrading my management domain to VCF 5.2.1 here shortly.

And that’s all for this one! If you learned something or I helped you out in some way, please make a comment and let me know. Thanks!