27 June 2025

My VMware homelab setup

In my role as TAM at VMware by Broadcom, I find it very useful to have a self managed homelab environment. Although I have several options available internally, it does not always provide the full access and/or flexibility. My homelab should be cost effective, but powerful enough to deploy a (nested) VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5 (at the time of...

Categories ESXi/VCF/vSphere Comments: 0

15 March 2025

VMSA2025-0004 – vSphere 6.7, 7.x 8.x

When you are reading this, hopefully you have patched your environment against [VMSA2025-0004], which has a critical severity and a CVSSv3 range from 7.1-9.3. If you have read the security advisory, you have seen that patches have been made available for several ESXi versions. Even with an expired contract, you are allowed to download and install patches that fix a...

Categories ESXi/vCenter/vSphere

28 January 2025

Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager – Change IP address

Since I am reorganizing my homenetwork, I wanted to move the Aria Products in their own network and created an extra VLAN with another IP subnet. After describing my experience with changing the IP address for Aria Automation and VIDM in a [previous blog], in this blog I will share my experience with changing the IP address of my Aria...

Categories Aria/vRSLCM

26 January 2025

VIDM  – Change IP address

Since I am reorganizing my homenetwork, I wanted to move the Aria Products in their own network and created an extra VLAN with another IP subnet. After describing my experience with changing the IP address for Aria Automation in a [previous blog], in this blog I will share my experience with changing the IP address of my VIDM appliance. In...

Categories VIDM/vRSLCM/Workspace ONE

26 January 2025

Aria Automation – Change IP address

Since I am reorganizing my homenetwork, I wanted to move the Aria Products in their own network and created an extra VLAN with another IP subnet. In this blog I will share my experience with changing the IP address of my Aria Automation appliance. The starting situation is as follows: The new IP address will be 172.16.2.220. Firewall is opened...

Categories Aria Automation

8 January 2025

Install VMware Identity Manager (VIDM) Patch CSP-97727

You probably guessed it… this post is about installing VMware Identity Manager (VIDM) Patch CSP-97727. Although the official guidance in Broadcom Article [380348] is good, I’d like to share my experience and add some additional information. Note that if you started all the way back with VIDM version 3.3.5 and went through all the upgrades you may run into an...

Categories VIDM

3 January 2025

Storage/NFS Considerations

My homelab was in need of some more serious storage and during this exercise I gained interesting insights that I will share in this post. Up until recently I made use of central Synology based NFSv3-storage and two locally attached PCI flash-cards for which I was restricted (drivers) to running ESX6.7 on the single physical host (HP-DL380Gen9). The fact I...

Categories NFS/Storage/vSAN

3 January 2025

SDDC-Manager tips&tricks

My VCF deployment started it’s life in June 2024 based on the 5.0 BOM. I managed to install most of the Aria-suite components and added NSX-ALB(AVI) to the mix, meanwhile steadily upgrading to the latest VCF-releases and intermediate async-patches. Eventually, I even converted the very same Management-WLD from OSA-to-NFS-to-ESA and got it to work with vLCM images (both not supported...

Categories SDDC-Manager/vCenter/VCF

16 December 2024

VCF 5.2.1.1 , NSX 4.2.1.1 and ESXi 8.0u3c (vLCM) upgrade

This post is about the upgrade of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2.1.0 to 5.2.1.1 in my homelab. My VCF homelab was deployed with the VCF 5.2.0 BoM and vLCM images and is not directly connected to the internet. I’m using the VCF offline depot functionality where the depot server can connect to the internet and SDDC Manager.I was a bit late...

Categories ESXi/NSX/VCF/vLCM

15 November 2024

VCSA file-based backup troubleshooting

In this short blog I will try to describe how to troubleshoot a VCSA-backup issue with the aim to understand the inner working of the VCSA BackupManager. While KB316609 describes most common VCSA backup issues, my customer encountered one that was not to be found on this list. Instead they observed the following three behaviors: And third, no updates whatsoever...

Categories vCenter/VCF/vSphere