Recovering ESXi 7.x & 8.x host after forgetting or losing root password
The general guidance and quickest way to recover an ESXi host if you have forgotten or lost the root password is to reset using vSphere Host Profiles if it was managed by vCenter Server or simply...
View ArticleInteresting VMware Homelab Kits for 2024
Where did 2024 go!? I can not believe there is only a few more months left before the end of the year! During VMware Explore US, I had several folks ask whether I was going to publish a 2024 edition of...
View ArticleNew ESXi-Arm Fling based on 8.0 Update 3b
I am very happy to share that the ESXi-Arm team has just released a brand new version of the popular ESXi-Arm Fling (v2.0), which is now based on ESXi 8.x codebase and specifically using the latest...
View ArticleQuick Tip - Suppress in-guest VMware Tools update notifications
If you have a Virtual Machine that has VMware Tools installed and a newer version is available, end users within the guest operating system might see a status bar notification with the following...
View ArticleESXi-Arm V2 Easter Egg
A new version of the ESXi-Arm Fling (V2) was recently released and the major update to the ESXi-Arm V2 Fling is that it is now based on the latest ESXi 8.x codebase, which is currently 8.0 Update 3b....
View ArticleVMware Explore Barcelona 2024 presentations now available
I came to learn during the week of VMware Explore Barcelona 2024, that the breakout sessions were not going to be recorded, but the presentations would be available only shortly after the conference. I...
View ArticleQuick Tip - vSAN ESA Cluster Health Check returns Error message: Expecting...
A fellow colleague was having some problems with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) CLI Installer when using the vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) bootstrap method, which automatically the...
View ArticleVMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Homelab Hardware Options
I have been getting a ton of inquiries lately, both internally as well as externally for hardware recommendations for building a new or updating an existing homelab/test environment to be able to...
View ArticleSharing a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering?
I am a huge fan of the new NVMe Tiering capability within vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and it has been fantastic to hear more users taking advantage of this new feature to see what it can do for their...
View ArticleQuick Tip - Retrieving vSAN usage & overhead information using vSAN API
Within the vSphere UI, you can view a detailed breakdown of your vSAN storage utilization including various system overhead by selecting a specific vSAN Cluster and then navigating to...
View ArticleSharing a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering, ESXi-OSDATA & VMFS Datastore?
With the ability to to share a single NVMe device for both NVMe Tiering and a local VMFS datastore ... I had an idea to push this further and see if I could also get an ESXi-OSData partition running on...
View ArticleQuick Tip - Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI is not supported on this...
In both Microsoft Windows 10 and 11, Virtualization Based Security (VBS) is enabled by default and this capability uses Hyper-V under the hood, which is a form of Nested Virtualization. If you are...
View ArticleHow to distinguish between classic vSphere VMs vs vSphere IaaS Pod VMs?
Not all vSphere-based VMs are the same! This is especially true with the introduction of vSphere IaaS (formally known as vSphere Supervisor or vSphere with Tanzu or Project Pacific) which includes a...
View ArticleEasier method to simulate custom ESXi SMBIOS hardware strings
Happy 2025! 🎉 Here is a fun one to kick off the New Year ☺️ Last year, I demonstrated a method for customizing the SMBIOS hardware string using Nested ESXi, but the solution was not perfect and...
View ArticlevCenter Server Identity Federation with Authentik Identity Provider
While answering a recent question on the VMware Reddit Community, I came to learn about Authentik, an open source identity provider (IdP), which is pretty feature rich and best of all, you can...
View ArticlevCenter Server Identity Federation with Keycloak Identity Provider without SCIM
After publishing my recent article about using Authentik as an Identity Provider (IdP) for vCenter Server, which I have recieved a lot of positive feedback both internally (including a small typo note...
View ArticlevSAN ESA HCL hardware mock VIB for Nested ESXi
Whether you are configuring vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) directly from vCenter Server or from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the underlying ESXi hardware is automatically validated against...
View ArticlePasswordless login to vCenter Server or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) using...
After spending some time playing with a couple of self-hosted Identity Providers solutions like Authentik and Keycloak for use with vCenter Server Identity Federation, I was curious about their...
View ArticleQuick Tip - Easily host VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Offline Depot using...
In IT, you never know when you need to quickly spin up a web server for hosting files ... One of my favorite and super easy way to do this is by leveraging Python's SimpleHTTPServer which can...
View ArticlevSAN ESA hardware mock VIB for physical ESXi deployment for VMware Cloud...
Several weeks back I had shared a solution in which you can install a hardware mock VIB for Nested ESXi when using vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) to work...
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