Month: May 2024

As of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.0, you can now use the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) when deploying a VCF Workload Domain where as in earlier releases, only the vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) was supported, which is typically what I deploy for testing purposes. While working on some enhancements to my VCF Automated…

Nested ESXi continues to be an invaluable resource that I use on almost a daily basis from solution prototyping, customer reproduction to automated lab deployments supporting both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), the use cases are simply endless! While you can do almost anything with Nested ESXi, mimicking or simulating specific…

This morning I came across an intriguing post on the VMware Reddit channel where a user had ran into an issue while attempting to upgrade their Windows 11 on Arm VM, running VMware Fusion on an Apple Silicon system. The error message stated that the CPU processor is not currently supported for Windows as you…

About 7-8 months ago I shared with you that I would be participating in the ROPA RUN for charity. As explained, the ROPA RUN is a charity relay running event where you start near Paris and run back to Rotterdam. Each team that participates has 8 runners which are divided in 2 groups, and each…

By default, SDDC Manager uses the online VMware Depot for downloading all software updates (security, patch, upgrade) for life-cycling a single VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) instance. SDDC Manager can also support air-gapped or disconnected environments by leveraging the VCF Offline Bundle Transfer Utility (OBTU), which my colleague Eric Gray recently published a detailed blog post…

I always love hearing about new and interesting hardware vendors from our VMware community, which is exactly how I came to learn about Protectli back in 2021 from fellow vExpert Trevor Smith. It was in 2021 where Trevor had shared with the vExpert Community that Protectli was developing a 10GbE hardware kit, which was really interesting…

As users are getting more familiar with the new Broadcom Support Portal (BSP), especially for downloading VMware software, an active entitlement is required for most downloads. Note: If you are new to Broadcom Support Portal (BSP), be sure to check out my recent blog post on tips for navigating and downloading from BSP. However, there are…

I know many of our internal teams (field, engineering, support, etc.), customers and partners have heavily relied on my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances (VA) over the years which makes it seamless to deploy both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) lab environments for learning, testing, troubleshooting, automation and development purposes. To support…

The Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) is most likely a new interface for many including myself after the planned VMware by Broadcom Day 2 Transition, which was completed on May 6th, 2024. The BSP is used for more than just support, it is the single place for managing your entitlements/licenses, software downloads, trials, security advisories, knowledge…

To prevent ESXi from PSOD’ing when an Intel Hybrid Consumer CPU is detected with non-uniform capabilities, a workaround can be applied to ignore the uniformity miss-match which is needed before the ESXi installer fully boots up and also after the initial reboot. For those looking to fully automate this process using ESXi Kickstart using USB…