Category: vSphere

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,...

Categories 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...

Categories 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...

Categories ESXi/vCenter/vSphere

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...

Categories vCenter/VCF/vSphere

14 January 2024

Unattended ESXi deployment with Go-Via

Recently I was looking for new way to deploy nested ESXi servers. Of course you can use the Nested ESXi OVA’s, but in some cases, I prefer to have more flexibility (or maybe it’s just for fun, exploring different options). I have manually setup a PXE and TFTP server, but this is not the most user-friendly way of doing things....

Categories ESXi/vSphere

23 October 2022

vSphere with Tanzu on VDS with HAProxy

This blogpost is about deploying vSphere with Tanzu on a VDS Setup with HAProxy. I know there has been more than one blogpost written on this topic, but here are the steps I took to get up and running with vSphere with Tanzu. The official VMware [documenatiation] has additional and detailed information. Pre-requirements Networking Setup Unify Network with the following...

Categories tanzu/vSphere

28 July 2022

Install ESXi 7 on SD Card or USB

There have been a lot of issues and discussion going on about the installation of ESXi 7 on SD Cards or USB devices. Although it was never recommended, many organizations installed ESXi on SD/USB without any issues until ESXi version 7 was released. While there have been several issues with some ESXi 7 versions, the release of ESXi 7.0U3c resolves...

Categories ESXi/vSphere

10 February 2022

Using vCenter Content Library with vRealize Automation 8

To speed up vRA VM deployments a common used practice is to copy the “golden” VM templates to each vSphere cluster with a script or via vRealize Orchestrator. In addition for vRA7 environments, the custom property “CloneFrom” [Custom Property] in combination with an Orchestrator Workflow is used to select the template from the cluster that the new VM is deployed...

Categories Automation/vCenter/vRA/vSphere

2 July 2021

Integrating vLCM with UMDS and/or HPE OneView

With the new vSphere 7 vLCM capabilities we are able to integrate with our own and third-party patch-store products to provide vLCM with the needed patches, drivers and firmware in an attempt to update our servers with a single cluster image. This all sounds very nice but along the way we may encounter several issues with certificates, downloading patches and...

Categories vCenter/VCF/vLCM/vSphere

15 July 2020

Change vCenter Identity Source from IWA to LDAPS

Introduction Update 15/11/2021 VMware has just released [VMSA-2021-0025] describing an IWA privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2021-22048). There will probably be a patch, but the workaround is to use AD over LDAPS authentication or Identity Provider Federation for ADFS if you are on vSphere 7.x. So if you didn’t have time to switch to one of these methodes, now is the time...

Categories vCenter/vSphere