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. ...

Correction (August 25, 2026): This article previously treated a 90-day Time Remaining threshold as if it also configured 90 days of historical input. Those controls have different meanings. The original procedure has been retired so it cannot be followed accidentally. Use the corrected follow-up instead: Using a 90-Day Planning Horizon Correctly in VCF Operations The follow-up separates three independent goals: Alerting when capacity is projected to run out within a future planning period. Choosing how much historical demand the projection may consider. Setting the future horizon used for VM Recommended Size calculations. It also corrects the earlier maintenance-window advice. For capacity forecasting, use the product’s projection reset and time-range exclusion controls when you need to disregard anomalous history; do not assume that an alert-maintenance schedule is equivalent to a historical-data exclusion. ...

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: ...

API correction (August 25, 2026): The UI workflow below remains useful, but the API request bodies originally published in this article were incorrect. Use the reviewed follow-up, Safely Canceling and Deleting Alerts with the VCF Operations API, for the supported query, cancel, and targeted-delete sequence. 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. ...

VCF compatibility checks are safety controls, not generic obstacles to an upgrade or bring-up. Broadcom documents temporary bypasses for two narrowly defined missing-compatibility-data failures. The files and properties differ by release and workflow, so the procedures must not be mixed. This article covers: VCF 5.x and VCF on VxRail 5.x upgrades that match Broadcom KB 323368. VCF 9.0.x bring-up failures on the VCF Installer appliance that match Broadcom KB 403075. Do Not Use This as a General Compatibility Bypass Use the applicable workaround only after confirming that the error matches the linked KB and that the compatibility data is current. ...

In the world of infrastructure management, we are often forced to choose between the legacy reliability of the past and the high-speed automation of the future. For years, HCL BigFix (formerly IBM BigFix) has been the “Heavyweight Champion”: a massive, unmovable force in endpoint management. But a challenger has matured into a dominant player: Salt (SaltStack). If you are building a modern, self-healing infrastructure, the conversation shouldn’t just be about “patching.” It should be about reaction time, extensibility, and developer experience. ...