https://www.why-did-it.fail/tags/vsphere/Recent content in vSphere on Why did IT failHugo -- gohugo.ioenCopyright © 2026 Dominik Textoris (formerly Zorgnotti). All Rights Reserved.Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2026-06-esx-hcl-checker/main/Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2026-06-esx-hcl-checker/main/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.https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2024-03-vsphereu3-vnuma-retain/Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2024-03-vsphereu3-vnuma-retain/_ 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.https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2024-02-hey-dude-why-is-evc-mode-going-crazy/Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2024-02-hey-dude-why-is-evc-mode-going-crazy/_ 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.https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2023-03-vcenter8-ciphers/Fri, 22 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2023-03-vcenter8-ciphers/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.https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2022-05-how-to-query-hcl-api/Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2022-05-how-to-query-hcl-api/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.https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2022-04-howto-attatch-clib-iso/Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2022-04-howto-attatch-clib-iso/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:https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2021-03-tag-vcenter-object/Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2021-03-tag-vcenter-object/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-TagAssignmenthttps://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2021-02-set-esxi-release-names-with-tags/Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2021-02-set-esxi-release-names-with-tags/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:https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2020-05-automating-templates-part4/Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2020-05-automating-templates-part4/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.https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2020-05-automating-templates-part3/Thu, 23 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2020-05-automating-templates-part3/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.https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2020-05-automating-templates-part2/Tue, 21 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2020-05-automating-templates-part2/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.https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2020-05-automating-templates-part1/Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2020-05-automating-templates-part1/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.https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2019-05-vsphere-mac-address-space/Mon, 07 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://www.why-did-it.fail/blog/2019-05-vsphere-mac-address-space/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.