Hi, I’m Cosmin — the writer behind Cosmin.us.

This site is a working notebook of the VMware and infrastructure-automation problems I run into in production, with the fixes, the screenshots, and the commands that actually worked. Most posts come straight out of upgrade runbooks, troubleshooting sessions, or proofs-of-concept I’ve put together for real environments.

What you’ll find here

  • VMware Cloud Foundation — installer, fleet management, SDDC Manager, upgrade paths from 4.x through 9.x, lifecycle/Aria suite integration.
  • vSphere & ESXi — patching via esxcli, VCSA upgrades, vSAN, NSX, certificate replacement, performance and compliance.
  • Aria / VCF Operations & Automation — capacity, rightsizing, custom super metrics, alerts, role-based access, API workflows.
  • Configuration management — Salt vs. Ansible vs. BigFix, deploying SaltStack Config via Lifecycle Manager, Windows patching at scale.
  • Cloud & adjacent — AVS on Azure, GCP three-tier deploys via Terraform / Ansible, Mac mini DFU recovery, and other stray notes.

If you’re here from a search engine, the post you landed on is the canonical answer to whatever you typed in — no fluff, no preamble, just the fix. If something is wrong or has changed in a newer release, the contact links below are the fastest way to reach me.

Elsewhere

All content here is my own and not affiliated with my employer or with Broadcom / VMware.