vTAM – virtual Technology Addicted Men

30 October 2026

VCF Binaries/ESXi-Components&Metadata download strategies

A picture is worth a thousand words, some might say: But, let me elaborate a little more on the possible strategies to download VCF (9.1.1) binaries, ESXi-components and metadata for VCF-Installer and VCF-OPS. There are several moving parts to be aware of and I will try to explain why and when to use the specific methods. The eventual goal is...

SDDC-Manager/VCF/vLCM/VMSP Comments: 0

29 October 2026

VCF 9.1 Certificate replacement

This post describes how to manually replace certificates for VCF Components with a Microsoft CA that is not connected to VCF. A high level overview of the steps that needs to be taken: VCF Operations: Generate CSRs As an example I will use VCF Operations and the VCF Operations Cloud Proxy There are two certificate categories: 1. Root Certificate, which...

VCF

14 July 2026

VCF 9.1 Patches installation experience

This post describes the installation of various VCF 9.1 Patches. Starting point is a fresh VCF 9.1 Deployment. Patches for VCF components are released on regular base. The release notes can be found [here]. At the time of writing the blogpost newer patches were released, but the experience should be the same. Download metadata, updates and patches in the offline...

VCF

10 July 2026

VCF 9.1 VMSP Visualization

With the release of VCF 9.0GA we noticed the new VMSP (Bootstrapped K8S) concept of running VCF-components. At that moment there were only two products utilizing this method: VCFA and vIDB, both running their own instance (Controllers/Workers) of VMSP. Now, with the release of VCF 9.1 it’s clear that this VMSP platform plays an important role of running many more...

VCF/VMSP Comment: 1

17 June 2026

Upgrade from vSphere 8.x to 9.1

This blogpost describes the upgrade from vSphere 8.x to 9.1. Why would someone go this route or VVF and not VCF you might ask? Well, even large customers have smaller environments that are (needs to be) completely disconnected from the main site. Note that even in most of these scenarios a VCF Edge design would be a perfect solution. See...

VCF/vSphere

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

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

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

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