VCF

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 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 spend enough time building out VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab, Proof of Concept, or nested environment, you will eventually hit “The Wall.” You know the hardware works. You know the ESXi versions will play nicely together. But SDDC Manager’s automated guardrails, the strict Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) checks and VVS (VMware Validated Solutions) interoperability validations throw up a red flag and stop your deployment or upgrade dead in its tracks. ...

In the world of modern infrastructure operations, observability is only as good as the actions it drives. Integrating VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations (formerly Aria Operations) with ITSM platforms like ServiceNow is a critical step for many of my clients. It transforms passive monitoring into active incident management. However, as with any integration involving webhooks and external APIs, things don’t always go according to plan. Recently, while implementing a ServiceNow integration following standard deployment guides (kudos to Brock Peterson for his excellent documentation on ServiceNow Management Packs and Webhooks), I hit a roadblock. My instance was failing to send notifications, and the standard UI errors were vague. ...