VMware on Why did IT fail

ESX HCL Checker

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On LinkedIn I just posted this: On your way to update your VCF/vSphere environment (perhaps to VCF 9.1?) but tired of manually checking each component in your vCenter again the Broadcom compatibility guide? This is a situation I often hear from my customers and I can totally relate to this. Before You Upgrade, Someone Has to Check the Hardware Every vSphere or VCF upgrade comes with the same prerequisite: verify that your host hardware — CPUs, NICs, HBAs, SSDs — is certified for the target release.

Let’s talk about VCF Management Services

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk about VCF Management Services VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 (and VMware vSphere Foundation for that matter) introduced the VCF Management Services which are sometimes called VMSP or VSP in the product. In my experience, customers stumble over this new platform in the VCF installer when configuring the update or installation and being faced with questions about CIDR blocks and a chunk of system resources (CPU, memory). What are the VCF Management Services?

VCF 9.1 - failed to discover component of type 'vcfa'

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Another quick and dirty blog about an issue that I enountered during the update from VCF 9.0 to VCF 9.1. During the VMware Management System Platform (VMSP) deployment, the task install components: VCF Operations SDDC LCM failed. In the details, you will find subtasks like like Discover VCF Automation information or Import legacy components using SDDC lifecycle service in an error state. The error indication is this message: Failed to discover component of type 'VCFA'.

VCF 9.1 - Platform Health Check Error in VMSP

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick and dirty rundown on troubleshooting an issue with the fluentd service on the new VMware Management System Platform (VMSP) that comes with the VCF 9.1 release. The issue - fluentd status is failing During the VCF 9.0 to 9.1 update, all tasks issued from VCF Operation and related to the VMSP started to fail. A common determinator was a failed health check that indicated that fluentd was not Ready.

vSphere 8 Update 3 - What is the "Retain virtual NUMA topology"-feature

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

_ Credits: I would like to thank my colleague Vladimir Petrov from the VCF BU for providing me with additional information that allowed me to write this summary _ The vSphere 8 Update 3 release notes contain lots of changes, but one of them caught my attention: Cluster-wide option to retain virtual NUMA topology: vSphere 8.0 Update 3 adds a setting to retain preconfigured vNUMA topology even if the VM moves, allowing for better NUMA topology tuning for VMs across all the hosts in the cluster.

Hey dude, why is the EVC mode for my virtual machine going wild

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

_ Disclaimer: This blog has been created to the best of my knowledge and understanding. If I need to correct a statement, I will mark that accordingly in a future update. _ _ Credits: I would like to thank our colleagues from the VCF BU for their support and patience with me, Ellen Mai from the PM team and especially Ross Knippel from the development side. Also, thanks to Thomas Thimm, Pascal Hanke, and Michael Hempel for testing things out.

New in Operations - Payload templates scope Enhancements

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A significant new enhancement in VMware Aria Operations 8.17.1 is the Payload Templates Scope Enhancements. Essentially, this feature allows you not only to include an object that is affected by an issue in a notification but also to include its descendant objects. Why is this feature significant? Consider a scenario where there is an outage on one ESXi host. This issue is primarily a concern for the infrastructure teams responsible for operations, but it also impacts the workloads and could potentially affect service levels.

Thanks to U3

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Update on 2024-08-15: Good news, with vSphere 8 update 3 the previous content became obsolte and I decided to take it offline and adjust the content here Update 3 contains some major enhancements which makes the life in this regards much easier: Starting in 8.0 Update 3, vSphere supports TLS 1.3 and 1.2 through the use of TLS profiles. TLS profiles simplify the job of administering TLS parameters and also improve supportability.

Quicknote - Finding state information in the NSX-T Policy API

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A collegue approached me with a customer request that concerned the NSX-T APIs. More specifically the customer is already using the NSX-T API in management mode but didn’t find the equivalent in the policy API. Doing my own research, I also failed to find the API right away. This post is basicially a reminder to check on the “realized” state and get the head around the desired state of the NSX-T policy API.

Howto - Query host Driver and Firmware via vCenter API

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Yet again, customer questions make the best blog posts. This time, it’s about retrieving the firmware and drivers from an ESXi host. So far, the customer uses esxcli which required either PowerCLI or direct SSH access, both were not the preferred choices in this case. High-level overview Starting with vSphere 7, vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) can handle this task. This blog post will show you how to create a HCL report for a given host which contains all the required information about firmware and drivers, as well as the bonus information about the support status of the system and devices.

Howto - Attach an ISO file from a Content Library

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago I was asked by a customer on how to attach an ISO file to a VM using RestAPI calls in the vCenter. Having never done this before I had a look at the problem today and want to share the steps with you. High-level overview Assuming you uploaded the ISO file to the content library prior to reading this, you need to obtain three information before you can attach an ISO file:

Tanzu Community Edition - Demo appliance

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TL,DR: GitHub Repo for TCE Demo appliance Motivation I was quite excited when VMware released Tanzu Community Edition. It is a free and open source distribution of VMware Tanzu, featuring Cluster-API and other amazing stuff. It was just what I needed to further expand my Kubernetes-fu and it is suitable sized for any home-lab. However, while TCE itself is easy enough to deploy, I had some challenges with the prerequisites for Docker and other components on my workstation(s).

Honey, I moved the VMs - vRSLCM

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Note: If you face this problem in a production environment you should reach out to VMware Global Support at this point. This is not an official guide. And even if you use it in non-prod, please make a backup before any changes. These steps are a mix and match from slack threads, engineering PRs etc that I compiled. So, the main work has been done by others and I want to thank you all who contributed and helped out!

TKGS failing to authenticate with the NSX ALB (AVI)

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

While rebuilding my lab from scratch with vSphere 7.0 U3c NSX Advanced (AVI) Load Balancer 21.1.3 I hit a situation where my TKGS installation would not continue with an error, it was stuck for hours: The control plane VM was unable to authenticate to the load balancer (Avi - https://:443/api/cluster) with the username '' and the supplied password. Validate the Supervisor cluster load balancer's authentication configuration. To make a long story short, while user, password and connectivity check out it looks like the AVI defaults changed along the way.

VMware Workstation - vctl unable to start

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Many thanks to Darius Davis from our engineering team who set me up on the solution. This morning I “just wanted to spin up a container quickly”. Having a recent version of VMware workstation already on my computer, using vctl was my preferred choice (In case you missed the blog). Problem My initial plans came to a halt as very attempt of a vctl system config or vctl system start threw an error:

LogInsight not receiving host data via cfapi

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On a recent, fresh installation of LogInsight I observed that no data from a set of hosts was coming into the LogInsight server. Debugging showed not issues related to the usual suspects of DNS, NTP, firewall or network which left me a bit puzzled. I found the answer by going through the logs of the loginsight agent (usually in /var/log/loginsight-agent/liagent_): 2021-07-20 07:08:22.319018 0x00007ff1c1a74700 DataController:167 | Creating cfapi transport 2021-07-20 07:08:22.

VMware EPIC2 Award - Integrity

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, what a day: Today I have received the Germany FY22/Q1 EPIC2 award at VMware for “Integrity”! FY22-Q1 VMware EPIC2 award EPIC2, this is short for execution, passion, integrity, customers, and community, is really the core of the VMware company culture. Integrity at VMware means: “Integrity focuses on building trust. Employees are expected to say what they do and do what they say. The company encourages peers to build and nurture relationships with one another, customers, partners, shareholders, and the community—without taking anything for granted.

Tagging the vCenter (object)

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am working on enhancing my vSphere release tagging script with the ability to tag the vCenter with a human-readable release name. As shown in the screenshot, it’s easy enough in the UI. Tags applied to the vCenter in the UI However, in PowerCLI there is no commandlet like get-vcenter. After many tries I gave up trying to force the object returned from $global:DefaultVIServers[0] to accept any tag-related operations. Today, I had the idea of working backwards from the assigned tags with Get-TagAssignment

Tagging ESXi hosts with canonical release names

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Update [2022-10-17] The VMware APIs for the KnowledgeBase have introduced a breaking change. This means the releases can no longer be updated without further development. Update [2021-03-09] The repository has been renamed to VMware-vSphere-Release-Tagging as the future scope should include the vCenter as well. Thank you for all the feedback! In this blog post I want to show you a practial application for the automation that I have built in my last project:

Providing machine readable VMware release data

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Update [2022-10-17] The VMware APIs for the KnowledgeBase have introduced a breaking change. This means the releases can no longer be updated without further development. I started a project with the goal to re-format VMware product release information in a way that can be used in automation and scripting. These days, even Excel can handle JSON. When searching for new projects I often need some external trigger to take the first step.

Automating vSphere template builds with a pipeline - IV

Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is the fourth part in a multi-part series about the automation of VMware vSphere template builds. A template is a pre-installed virtual machine that acts as master image for cloning virtual machines from it. In this series I am describing how to get started on automating the process. As I am writing these blog post while working on the implementation some aspects may seem “rough around the edges”. Part 1: Overview/Motivation Part 2: Building a pipeline for a MVP Part 3: An overview of packer Part 4: Concourse elements and extending the pipeline The focus in this part are the concourse basics.

Automating vSphere template builds with a pipeline - III

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third part in a multi-part series about the automation of VMware vSphere template builds. A template is a pre-installed virtual machine that acts as master image for cloning virtual machines from it. In this series I am describing how to get started on automating the process. As I am writing these blog post while working on the implementation some aspects may seem “rough around the edges”. Part 1: Overview/Motivation Part 2: Building a pipeline for a MVP Part 3: An overview of packer Part 4: Concourse elements and extending the pipeline If all went well, part 2 left you with a functional Ubuntu template.

Automating vSphere template builds with a pipeline - II

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second part in a multi-part series about the automation of VMware vSphere template builds. A template is a pre-installed virtual machine that acts as master image for cloning virtual machines from it. In this series I am describing how to get started on automating the process. As I am writing these blog post while working on the implementation some aspects may seem “rough around the edges”. Part 1: Overview/Motivation Part 2: Building a pipeline for a MVP Part 3: An overview of packer Part 4: Concourse elements and extending the pipeline This part will focus on getting you started with a minimum viable product by building a single Ubuntu 18.

Automating vSphere template builds with a pipeline - I

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a multi-part series about the automation of VMware vSphere template builds. A template is a pre-installed virtual machine that acts as master image for cloning virtual machines from it. In this series I am describing how to get started on automating the process. As I am writing these blog post while working on the implementation some aspects may seem “rough around the edges”. Part 1: Overview/Motivation Part 2: Building a pipeline for a MVP Part 3: An overview of packer Part 4: Concourse elements and extending the pipeline If you want to know more about the topic here is an awesome blog series about automated template management from Eric Lee - many thanks to Timo Sugliani for the recommendation.

VMware Workstation - Updates to v15 and later breaks Minikube

Sat, 21 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Update from 2020-01-11 below Life was good when I was playing around with Minikube on my private Windows Notebook until I had the (stupid) idea to use choco to update everything to the latest version. Now, Minikube would not start and notably these two packages were updated: VMware Workstation 15 Pro: 15.5.1 build-15018445 minikube version: v1.6.1 The docker driver for VMware (docker-machine-vmware) hadn’t changed. Problem The error suggested that “vmrun” isn’t installed:

An overview of the vSphere MAC address space

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recently another TAM requested some infos on this topic in VMware’s slack, finally giving me the push to publish as I had this post for ages in my drafts. Given, it is somewhat of an edge case for only a hand full of customers and the problem itself is not new but here is my take. As always please do your own research before you put this untested into production.

The edge in NSX-v versus NSX-T

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

While bringing myself up-to-date with NSX-T I struggled with the terminology in relation to my existing NSX-v knowledge. There are quite a few awesome blog posts around -v or -T and I am trying to compare the “edge” at a high level. I hesitated to make a public post out of it since I am myself quite new to NSX-T and my post may not be 100% correct, but then figured that I can just learn from the feedback.

VCDX design requirements

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post has not the intend to define what a requirement/constraint is, there are already very good posts out there. Lately I pointed a lot of people over to Jeffrey Kusters who did an excellent job of summarizing it but I included also two other good links: https://www.jeffreykusters.nl/2018/06/25/breaking-down-the-conceptual-design-rcars-and-amprs-vcdx-style/ http://www.i-1.nl/blog/?p=58016 https://blog.jgriffiths.org/advice-to-vcdx-candidates-from-a-double-vcdx/ What is this about? If you are like me, coming from a pure technical background, the conceptual model of the VCDX exam proves to be the hardest part - especially since your journey starts with it and there is no shortcut around it (Rene gives good advice, as always https://vcdx133.

VCDX basic skills - the whiteboard

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert on this topic nor have I got the feeling that my performance during the VCDX defense was exceptional. However, some basic training got me from “zero” to at least one step further - more or less readable handwriting. We all take it for granted - there is a whiteboard in the room and we all know how it works, right? In any kind of meeting, when there is an idea in the room, you need to take notes or need to visualize something - you start drawing and writing on the whiteboard.

Achievement - VCDX-DCV 272

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

On December 13th, 2018 I received an email that confirmed that I passed the VCDX certification. For me this marks the end of a chapter which I would call the VCDX journey and I have to thank many, many people for supporting me along the way up to this point. Easily the longest supporter of my efforts has been Bilal Ahmed. In his always good natured way he managed to guide me since VCAP design-days with solid advice and motivation.

Route-based IKEv2 site-to-site VPN between Azure and an NSX-v ESG

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick drop of notes on how to configure this if anyone else needs it. You probably searched the net and found tons of howtos on policy-based VPNs. However, I needed to do a route-based VPN my Azure resources with multi-devices and you can have only a single VPN-policy on a Gateway. Infos on IPSEC settings where taken from the Azure documentation - please make sure you read the fields marked important.