VCF – vTAM

12 November 2025

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Offline Depot Installation and configuration

Introduction For dark / disconnected VCF Deployments it has been quite a challenge for some time to import files to SDDC Manager and vRSLCM. This changed with the Offline Depot introduction in VCF 5.2 and got even better with VMware Cloud Foundation 9. In this release you can setup a Unified Offline Depot, hosting the install and update files for...

VCF

3 November 2025

VMware VCF Offline Depot Certificates

Recently I have been doing some VCF 9 deployments in my homelab environment and I am using an VCF9 offline depot to keep the environment as close as possible to any customer environment. For now, I will not go into the details of installating and configure the offline depot webserver, since there have been various blogs about this topic. (Perhaps...

VCF Comment: 1

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

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

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

26 August 2021

Password management in VCF with Powershell and PowerVCF

SDDC Manager is the core component of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) to manage full life cycle management tasks such as deployment, configuration, patching and upgrades. SDDC Manager can even be used to update and (automatically) rotate the passwords of all components. This feature called is Password management and can be found under Administration, Security. With Password Management it is possible...

Powershell/VCF

20 May 2020

VIA – VMware Imaging Appliance

Many customers need and use tooling for imaging their ESXi-servers. Some of them are very old and some newer but unable to image their servers using the latest ESXi builds. Not many know that the VMware Cloud Foundation Suite is incorporating an Imaging Appliance (VIA). This appliance started it’s life during the EVO:Rail and EVO:Rack era at VMware. With this...