VMware Pilot

Author: Wei Zhou, VMware by Broadcom — wei-wz.zhou@broadcom.com This is a community-driven project by a VMware engineer, not an official VMware product. For official VMware developer tools see developer.broadcom.com.

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Multi-step workflow orchestration for VMware MCP skills — state machine, approval gates, audit trail.

Companion skills handle everything else:

Skill	Scope	Install
vmware-aiops	VM lifecycle, deployment, guest ops, cluster	uv tool install vmware-aiops
vmware-monitor	Read-only: inventory, health, alarms, events	uv tool install vmware-monitor
vmware-storage	Datastores, iSCSI, vSAN management	uv tool install vmware-storage
vmware-vks	Tanzu Namespaces, TKC cluster lifecycle	uv tool install vmware-vks
vmware-nsx	NSX networking: segments, gateways, NAT	uv tool install vmware-nsx-mgmt
vmware-nsx-security	DFW firewall rules, security groups	uv tool install vmware-nsx-security
vmware-aria	Aria Ops: metrics, alerts, capacity	uv tool install vmware-aria
vmware-avi	AVI load balancing, pool management, AKO K8s ops	uv tool install vmware-avi

Install

uv tool install vmware-pilot
vmware-pilot mcp          # start the MCP server (stdio)

Offline / Air-Gapped Install (from source)

This project uses the modern PEP 517 build system (hatchling), so there is no setup.py by design — that is expected, not a missing file. If you cloned the source and hit ERROR: File "setup.py" or "setup.cfg" not found ... editable mode currently requires a setuptools-based build, your pip is older than 21.3 and cannot do an editable (-e) install with a non-setuptools backend. Editable mode is a developer convenience, not needed to run the tool — do one of:

# From the source tree — a normal (non-editable) install builds a wheel:
pip install .              # NOT  pip install -e .

# ...or upgrade pip first, and editable works too:
pip install --upgrade pip && pip install -e .

For a truly air-gapped host, build the wheels on a connected machine and copy them over — the target then needs no network:

# On a connected machine, collect this package + its dependencies as wheels:
pip wheel . -w dist        # → dist/*.whl   (or: uv build, for just this package)

# Copy dist/ to the air-gapped host, then install offline:
pip install --no-index --find-links dist vmware-pilot

MCP Tools (13 — 4 read, 9 write)

Tool	Description
get_skill_catalog	List all available skills and tools for workflow design
list_workflows	List built-in and custom templates
review_workflow	Sanity-check a planned workflow before execution
design_workflow	Natural language goal → draft workflow
update_draft	Edit draft workflow steps
confirm_draft	Finalize draft → ready to execute
plan_workflow	Generate execution plan from template, returns workflow_id
create_workflow	Create custom workflow from step list (refused if a destructive step has no approval gate before it)
run_workflow	Execute workflow, pauses at approval gates
get_workflow_status	Query state + diff report + audit log
approve	Human approval, continue execution
rollback	Explicit, best-effort undo of steps pilot recorded as succeeded — never automatic
cancel_workflow	Cancel a workflow — move it to the terminal CANCELLED state

Built-in Templates (15)

n is the number of VMs (or drift items); ranges depend on which optional parameters are set. clone_and_test has 7 steps when change_spec is a guest command (an extra gate before it runs in staging). investigate_alert's approvals are synthesis checkpoints; its steps are all reads. See skills/vmware-pilot/references/templates.md for parameters and steps.

Template	Steps	Approval	Skills Used
clone_and_test	6-7	Yes	aiops, monitor
incident_response	4	Yes	monitor, aiops
investigate_alert	4 (8 with deep_dive)	Yes	monitor, aria
plan_and_approve	3	Yes	aiops
compliance_scan	1-3	No	monitor, aria
network_segment_setup	3-6	Yes	nsx, nsx-security
vks_cluster_deploy	4	Yes	vks
rolling_restart	2+3n	Yes	aiops, monitor
capacity_expansion	5	Yes	aria, aiops, monitor
disaster_recovery	5	Yes	aiops, monitor, nsx
patch_deployment	1+3n	Yes	aiops, monitor
storage_expansion	6	Yes	storage
baseline_capture	1-5	No	monitor, nsx, storage
baseline_audit	1-5	No	monitor, nsx, storage, aria
baseline_remediate	3+n	Yes	varies

MCP Configuration

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vmware-pilot": {
      "command": "vmware-pilot",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Fallback: {"command": "uvx", "args": ["--from", "vmware-pilot", "vmware-pilot-mcp"]} still works, but uvx re-resolves against PyPI on every start and fails behind a TLS-inspecting corporate proxy (invalid peer certificate: UnknownIssuer). The installed entry point above touches the network zero times; set UV_NATIVE_TLS=true if you must use uvx.

License

MIT