Henk Engelsman

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 Comments: 0

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

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...

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...

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...

VIDM

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...

ESXi/NSX/VCF/vLCM

30 March 2024

Send Aria Operations Alerts to MS Teams via Webhook Notification Plugin

Recently I was looking at different options to send alerts from Aria Operations to another system like SMS, Signal, Slack and MS Teams. Sending Alerts to SMS did not seem very secure and requires a gateway (or 3rd party service). Signal was lacking APIs and a bit to complex. Slack works great but was not an option at this time,...

Aria/Aria Operations/vROPS

Author: Henk Engelsman