Quick Tip - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Bringup fails without persistent...
You will never run into this problem if you follow current recommended practices to install the ESX-OSData volume on a persistent storage device that could either be dedicated and/or co-located your...
View ArticleESXi on GMKtec NucBox K11
The GMKtec NucBox has been growing in popularity amongst the VMware community as a modern AMD Ryzen-based alternative to the Intel/ASUS NUC, offering many of the same advantages while avoiding some of...
View ArticleAutomating bulk OPNsense Unbound DNS host overrides
I recently deployed OPNsense in my homelab, which I will be using it to setup my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment. A critical part infrastructure service that is often miss-configured is DNS...
View ArticleQuick Tip - Which vCenter Server Key Provider (KMS) is a VM using?
vCenter Server requires a Key Management Service (KMS) for enabling VM Encryption, vTPM, or vSAN Encryption. Users have the choice of configuring the embedded Native Key Provider (NKP) built into...
View ArticlevCenter Server Identity Federation with Synology SSO
I recently found another cool use case for my Synology NAS, which is using the Synology SSO application to setup vCenter Server Identity Federation. I had not considered looking at Synology, but I was...
View ArticlevCenter Server Identity Federation with Pocket ID
Having explored various OIDC identity providers, including Authentik, KeyCloak and Synology SSO, I recently came across Pocket ID, a super basic OIDC provider. Instead of using traditional username and...
View ArticleQuick Tip - Listing vSphere Global Permissions using PowerShell
Parsing complex HTML is definitely challenging, even with PowerShell. I had hoped to use the free tier of ChatGPT and their latest 4o model to help build a PowerShell function for HTML parsing, but I...
View ArticlevCenter Server Identity Federation with Zitadel
Not sure when it happened, but I have been binging self-hosted identity providers like Netflix shows, this season features Authentik, KeyCloak, Synology SSO and Pocket ID. To add to my collection, I...
View ArticleQuick Tip - Retrieving vCenter Identity Federation Secret Token Expiry
As part of setting up vCenter Server or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Identity Federation, if your identity provider supports the SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) protocol, you must...
View ArticlevCenter Server Identity Federation with Kanidm
Looks like I will be expanding my collection of identity providers (Authentik, KeyCloak, Synology SSO, Pocket ID and Zitadel) that can be used with vCenter Server and/or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)...
View Article