If you’re moving vCenter Server from 8.0 U3x to 9.1.0.0 — typically as part of a VCF 9.1 deployment or a VVF 9.1 upgrade — the run can fail partway through with: Error attempting Upgrade Database Schema Please check vcintegrity migration logs for details. This is one of those failures that looks scary in the UI but has a clean, well-understood root cause: a handful of orphaned rows in the vcIntegrity database that trip a new foreign-key constraint introduced in 9.1. Below is the whole story — what the error means, how to read the logs, why it happens, and how to clear it so the upgrade completes. It’s the same shape of problem I wrote about in fixing PostgreSQL on Fleet Management 9.0.1: a schema change colliding with pre-existing data. ...

If you have upgraded your VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment to version 5.x from an earlier release, you may find yourself unable to update BOM (Bill of Materials) components from the SDDC Manager UI. The “Update Now” or “Configure Update” button is greyed out and you see a frustrating error: “Update cannot be started now as compatibility file is missing” This post walks through the symptoms, root cause, and the step-by-step fix based on Broadcom KB 396202. ...

If you’ve been working with VCF Operations 9.1, you may have noticed that on the Build > Lifecycle > VCF Management > Components page, manually-added components such as VCF Operations for Networks, Log Management, Real-Time Metrics or VCF Automation no longer have a “Delete” option available in the UI. In VCF Operations 9.0, this was possible on the Fleet Management > Lifecycle > Components page by clicking the three vertical dots next to a component and selecting Delete. That option is gone in 9.1. ...

In the previous post, I covered how to license a standalone ESX 9.0 host by importing a private license file directly on the host with esxcli. That workflow was straightforward: generate a keypair, grab a license file from the portal, scp both files to the host, run two esxcli commands, done. VCF 9.1 changes everything. Starting with 9.1, you cannot generate individual ESX host licenses from the VCF Business Services console and apply them directly. Instead, Broadcom introduced a License Server appliance — a small OVA that sits between the portal and your hosts. You import your private license file into the License Server, and the License Server issues host-scoped licenses to each ESX host via API. ...

Customizing Windows guest instances in VMware environments has traditionally been handled by the VMware Guest Customization Specification (Sysprep-based). While this approach works, it has limitations — especially when you need cloud-agnostic blueprints that work across vCenter, Azure, AWS, and GCP cloud accounts. Enter Cloudbase-Init — the Windows equivalent of Cloud-Init. It provides powerful guest customization capabilities including user creation, password injection, hostname configuration, SSH public keys, and user-data script execution. This guide walks through the full process of installing and configuring Cloudbase-Init on a Windows Server template for use with VCF Automation (formerly VMware Aria Automation / vRealize Automation). ...

If you need to pull log events programmatically from VMware Aria Operations for Logs (formerly vRealize Log Insight), filtering by a specific hostname, this guide walks you through the entire process — from authentication to querying the powerful internal API endpoint. This approach is inspired by Brock Peterson’s excellent series on the Aria Operations for Logs API, expanded here with full session authentication steps and hostname-specific query examples. Prerequisites Before we begin, you’ll need: ...

In a previous post I covered how to configure VCF Operations 9 to use 90 days of usage data for rightsizing recommendations. That gives you a solid foundation — but once you start reviewing the recommendations, you will quickly notice that the engine does not enforce any organizational sizing standards. For example, the engine might recommend reducing a VM from 8 vCPUs to 5, or suggest removing just 1 GB of RAM. Both are technically valid from a demand perspective, but in practice: ...

As organizations adopt VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, a common question comes up: what do I do with my existing vCenter 8.x environments? The good news is that VCF 9.0 supports backwards compatibility with 8.x vCenter instances. You can import them as workload domains directly from the VCF Operations console, bringing your legacy infrastructure under VCF management without rebuilding from scratch. In this post I will walk through the full import process — from prerequisites and networking requirements to NSX deployment and validation — so you know exactly what to expect before you hit the “Import” button. ...

In a previous post I walked through configuring VCF Operations 9 capacity policies to align with a 90-day planning window. If you followed that guide, the good news is that rightsizing recommendations share the same underlying policy — Risk Level, Time Remaining thresholds, and buffers all feed directly into the rightsizing engine. So why a separate post? Because rightsizing is a different workflow with its own nuances. Capacity planning asks “when will my clusters run out of room?” Rightsizing asks “are my individual VMs sized correctly for what they actually use?” The policy is the same foundation, but how you consume and act on the results is completely different. ...

As a solutions architect managing a VCF 9 Operations instance, one of the first things I tune after initial deployment is the capacity engine. Out of the box, VCF Operations uses an exponential decay model that heavily weights the most recent data points. That is great for catching sudden spikes, but it can misrepresent your true capacity posture if your environment has cyclical workloads — think month-end batch jobs, quarterly reporting bursts, or seasonal traffic patterns. ...