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. ...

After years of running my tech blog on WordPress, I finally pulled the trigger and migrated everything to Hugo — a blazing-fast static site generator — hosted on Cloudflare Workers. The result? A site that loads in milliseconds, costs nothing to host, and requires zero server maintenance. Here’s exactly how I did it, what went wrong, and what I’d do differently. Why Leave WordPress? WordPress served me well for years. But as my post count grew to 278 articles (mostly VMware VCF guides with dozens of screenshots each), the cracks started showing: ...

If you manage a VMware Aria Operations (formerly vROps) environment, you know how quickly alert fatigue can set in. In this guide i will focus specifically on the “Guest OS Experiencing CPU queue” alert. While helpful in identifying CPU-constrained VMs, it can quickly generate thousands of entries if you have a heavily over provisioned environment. Inspired by Brock Peterson’s excellent guide on Alert Hygiene, we are going to look at exactly how to cancel and delete these specific CPU queue alerts, both via the User Interface and programmatically via the API. ...

If you upgraded (or deployed) ESX/ESXi 9.0 in a lab and let the evaluation expire, you can end up in the classic chicken-and-egg situation: your vCenter is a VM, but you can’t power it on because the host is no longer licensed. With VCF / vSphere Foundation 9.0, licensing moved away from the old 25-character keys and into license files(normally handled through VCF Operations), which is great… until you don’t have VCF Ops up yet. (VMware Blogs) ...