Marco Baaijen

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

3 October 2022

vIDM/Access Connector <> DC2022 [Updated2]

Heads-up to everyone in the process of upgrading their Active Directory Domain Services to 2022! As mentioned in the online documentation, VMware does NOT support AD on Windows Server 2022. The main reason for this is the fact Microsoft changed their LDAP-search member attribute specification, resulting in the Connector failing to retrieve more than 1499 results (this is the MaxValRange...

Access/VIDM/Workspace ONE

3 May 2022

vRSLCM SSO with CNAME

With vRSLCM we are able to integrate with vIDM for SSO purposes. This works flawlessly as long as we use the actual hostname fqdn’s, but as soon as customers use a CNAME to access the same vRSLCM instance with SSO enabled, we encounter SSO logon redirect issues. With this blog-post I will try to explain how to workaround this issue...

VIDM/vRSLCM

9 December 2021

Air-gapped Terraform <> vRA integration

As a follow-up to the previous Terraform integration post I will now try to explain how we can complete the integration in a fully air-gapped environment. To achieve this we need to make several resources locally available. Let me first flash back to the non air-gapped situation for which we zoom into the external resources used. Let’s revisit the external...

Automation/Terraform/vRA

6 October 2021

Getting Started with vRA 8 Terraform Runtime Integration

Terraform is gaining a lot of traction in the Infrastructure-as-code space, both from a end-user perspective as within integrations. Let me try to explain what each of these bring with vRA 8! Terraform as end-user For configuring vRA related constructs as Cloud-accounts, Projects, Users, Groups, Cloud-Templates For triggering Cloud-Template deployments Leverages local Terraform executable and provider (vSphere, vRA, NSX, …)...