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...

Categories VIDM

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...

Categories 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...

Categories SDDC-Manager/vCenter/VCF

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...

Categories ESXi/NSX/VCF/vLCM

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

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...

Categories NSX/Photon/VCF

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,...

Categories Aria/Aria Operations/vROPS

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...

Categories Aria Automation/Automation/Orchestrator/vRA

15 March 2024

Create a user in the VIDM System Directory

While running into some issues with Aria Automation I needed to create a new testuser. Since it was not possible at that time to create an Active Directory account, I decided to create a local account in the VIDM System Directory. Sidenote: depending on where you are in the UI or documentation the product may be called VIDM, VMware Identity...

Categories Access/Powershell/VIDM/vRA

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