Marco Baaijen

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 we 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 Comments: 0

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

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

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...

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...

SDDC-Manager/vCenter/VCF

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...

vCenter/VCF/vSphere

11 April 2024

NSX – New Compute Manager – FQDNs are not configured!

During my latest VCF lab deployment I encountered an issue that was not easily found both internally and external. Therefor I needed to troubleshoot the issue in detail which resulted in a working environment and now known root-causes My homelab is old and started it’s life in the Windows 2012R2 era. This means I still use the DNS-services from that...

NSX/Photon/VCF

21 March 2024

Aria Automation Rebuild VMs – images

As you may all know, Aria Automation 8.12 incorporated a new Rebuild day-2 feature with the aim to support re-provisioning of vSphere machines while keeping basic configurations in tact. Under the hood this rebuild action deletes the VM and then re-creates the VM while maintaining all of it’s properties. At that moment in time the feature was only available for...

Aria Automation/Automation/Orchestrator/vRA

3 April 2023

vRA8 Roles, Permissions & Policies

With this post I would like to inform you on the way we Roles, Permissions and Policies [RRP] are designed within vRA8. While working with customers I realized there was some confusion and different expectations on how this was implemented. With help of some slides I would like to make it clearer and more consumable. Let’s start with an overview!...

vRA

Author: Marco Baaijen