vTAM – virtual Technology Addicted Men

20 March 2026

Native Key Provider – Troubleshooting

This blog is all about the Native Key Provider in vCenter and the way it can cause misunderstanding and troublesome situations. That is the moment we need to know more what is happening under the hood. In this post I will try to explain what I learned. First, lets summarize what the NKP entails! This provider is included in vSphere...

vCenter Comments: 0

26 February 2026

Cannot login user root@127.0.0.1: no permission

If you are running vSphere environments you will probably recognize this vCenter warning and log-entry that is flooding your (log)server-logs. Luckily I was working with a customer that did not accept the default answer as mentioned in this KB. Therefor I investigated the issue and found several causes for this error to occur. The basis for this error to occur...

ESXi/vCenter/vRLI Comments: 0

12 November 2025

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Offline Depot Installation and configuration

Introduction For dark / disconnected VCF Deployments it has been quite a challenge for some time to import files to SDDC Manager and vRSLCM. This changed with the Offline Depot introduction in VCF 5.2 and got even better with VMware Cloud Foundation 9. In this release you can setup a Unified Offline Depot, hosting the install and update files for...

VCF

3 November 2025

VMware VCF Offline Depot Certificates

Recently I have been doing some VCF 9 deployments in my homelab environment and I am using an VCF9 offline depot to keep the environment as close as possible to any customer environment. For now, I will not go into the details of installating and configure the offline depot webserver, since there have been various blogs about this topic. (Perhaps...

VCF Comments: 0

21 August 2025

How to create your own Nested ESXi OVA.

Over the years [William Lam] has created very useful OVAs and PowerCLI scripts to quickly deploy Nested ESXi VMs and vCenter. The latest version of the Nested ESXi OVA is 8.0U3c and can be found on the Broadcom Support Portal under [Free Downloads], Flings, Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance -> <version> Although still very useful, the ESXi 8.0U3c release dates back...

Automation/ESXi/VCF/vSphere

28 July 2025

VCF 5.2.1.x Offline Depot Updates

Update 18/12/2025: As stated earlier we had to use newer VCF9.x vdt-tooling to be able to download asyncPatches for VCF5.2.x. Meanwhile Broadcom released VCF5.2.2 that now also contains updated tooling. Below a short overview of the available builds: There was also a change in the offline depot documentation for VCF 5.2 where we notice to use of new cmd-line parameter...

VCF

30 June 2025

vSphere Memory Tiering with Asus Hyper M.2 X16 for nested VCF 9

As written in the previous blog, I was quite satisfied with my homelab setup. It doesn’t take to much space, is low noise and has enough resources and performance to run a Nested VCF 5 setup. With the release of VCF 9, I am still able to run a basic setup, but with the additional VCF Automation and Supervisor components,...

ESXi/vSphere

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...

ESXi/VCF/vSphere

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...

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...

Aria/vRSLCM