For years, VI admins have relied on vROPS—now called VMware Cloud Foundation Operations (VCF Operations)—to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their environments. But working with these tools often means context switching, learning multiple interfaces, and spending valuable time digging through dashboards to find the right piece of data.
What if you could talk to your infrastructure directly? What if you could say, “What’s wrong with my VM roy-vra?” and get an actionable answer back?
That’s the power of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—and why we built the VCF Operations MCP Server.
What is MCP?
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging standard for connecting Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents with real systems. It provides a common way to define “tools” (APIs, queries, commands) that the agent can call when it needs to act or fetch information.
Think of MCP as a universal adapter for making AI useful instead of just chatty.
- It standardizes how LLMs call into external systems.
- It enables elicitations (interactive back-and-forth to resolve ambiguities).
- It allows VI admins to ask questions naturally—while the MCP server does the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
Introducing the VCF Operations MCP Server
Our MCP server connects directly to VCF Operations and exposes over 40 tools that cover the lifecycle of monitoring, troubleshooting, compliance, and optimization.
Here’s what it gives you:
- Resource Discovery: VMs, hosts, clusters, datastores, vCenters, vSAN clusters.
- Metrics & Performance: Retrieve VM and infrastructure metrics, forecasts, and relationships.
- Alerting & Anomalies: See alerts, symptoms, root causes, and anomalies.
- Troubleshooting & Optimization: SLA checks, recommendations, RCA insights.
- vSAN Management: Capacity analysis, health checks, and performance troubleshooting.
- Adapter Management: Explore adapters and resource kinds.
- Reports: Generate, download, and list reports with improved naming.
- Configuration: Manage SSL/TLS and connection settings.
Why VI Admins Should Care
Traditional monitoring requires dashboards, pivoting between tabs, and filtering lists. With MCP:
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Ask in plain English: “What’s the CPU usage over the past week for the VM with the IP 172.16.20.10?”
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Get guided answers: The MCP server uses elicitation to clarify ambiguous queries. “Did you mean VM
roy-vrain cluster A or cluster B?” -
Automate reporting: “Generate a VM performance report for the vSphere cluster where the VM with the IP 10.100.100.100 runs.”
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Troubleshoot faster: “Give me a root cause analysis of the issues for VM roy-vra with actionable next steps.”
Easy to Run
The MCP server is designed to be simple to deploy:
- Run directly with Python 3.11+
- Or run as a Docker container
- Remote MCP support is coming soon
Once running, you can connect it to your favorite MCP-enabled agents. Currently, elicitation support is limited within the different Agents, but works well in Cursor and VSCode GitHub Copilot. Other agents such as Claude Desktop, and Claude Code will hopefully add support soon.
Example Scenarios
Here are some real-world use cases where MCP makes a difference:
1. Quick Health Checks
Prompt: “What is wrong with my VM 172.16.20.125?”
Response:
2. Deep dive on a specific area
Prompt: “Please provide a detailed report on the CPU usage for the past 2 weeks for the VM roy-vra”
Response:
3. Report Generation
Prompt: “Which reports can i generate for the VM roy-vra”
Response:
Prompt: “Please generate a capacity report for this VM in PDF format”
Response:
The Future of MCP for VI Admins
The VCF Operations MCP Server is just the beginning. As more agents support MCP and its emerging feature set, VI admins will be able to:
- Seamlessly integrate AI into daily operations.
- Eliminate time wasted searching for the right dashboard.
- Move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive optimization.
We’re making infrastructure conversations natural—so you can focus less on clicks and more on outcomes.
Closing Thoughts
The role of the VI admin is evolving. With MCP, you don’t just have dashboards—you have an AI-powered assistant that knows your environment, speaks your language, and helps you troubleshoot and optimize faster.
If you’ve ever wished your infrastructure could talk back, now it can.
Bringing the power of MCPs to VI admins starts here.