Authentik is an Open Source Identity Provider which I currently use outside of my VCF homelab. William Lam has published a number of different posts about Authentik, one of which is how to use it as an IdP with vCenter. I figured I’d be able to use it as an Identity Source for VCF SSO … Read more
After spending a bit of time tidying up cables in my rack, I figured I’d take the opportunity to write about my current setup. Here it is in all its glory: Not the greatest picture. From top to bottom: Here’s a diagram of how it’s all connected together. Not in the diagram is a UniFi … Read more
I’m not going to run any benchmarks as there’s plenty of information out there, but what I’m going to do is deploy VCF on a single MS-A2 and time it, I’ve included times for deploying onto a single NUC Extreme, as well as a single Xeon host for comparison. To keep things as fair as … Read more
I’ve been experimenting with VCF 9 in my homelab recently and I’ve been trying out some day 2 activities. Invariably, with homelabs you end up having to rebuild some (or all) of it as you experiment, and I found myself in that position. I do intend on writing a blog covering how my lab is … Read more
My homelab currently comprises of 3x Intel NUC Extremes (11th gen, 1x i9, 2x i7) along with 2x Xeon workstation based hosts. Whilst I like the NUCs, I’ve been wanting to replace the Xeon workstations. They started off in a Dell SFF workstation, but due to heat management issues I removed the CPUs and I’ve … Read more
I previously blogged about how you can get BGP working between a UDM-SE and NSX Edge. I wanted to revisit the topic as BGP is now built into the UDM itself as of GW firmware 4.1 I believe, and there is no requirement to visit the command line except to troubleshoot and verify. I also … Read more
I recently upgraded my Domain Controller to the Server 2025. Not long after the upgrade, I noticed I could no longer sign into vSphere with AD accounts. Under Single Sign On in vCenter Server, against my domain I saw the following error message: A vCenter Single Sign-On service error occurred Under the configuration for LDAP … Read more
Whilst HCX is a perfectly suitable to migrate most workloads, there are some which require careful consideration and planning such as SQL Clusters, Oracle (or other database servers), load balancers, and even Active Directory Domain Controllers. Domain Controllers definitely fall into the category of requiring extra consideration before migrating them with HCX. Whilst it is … Read more
I see quite a bit of confusion about this internally and with customers, so I figured I would write a quick blog post on the subject. Starting with HCX 4.9, you are able to active HCX Enterprise services using VCF Solution Licensing. To save you a little bit of reading, here is the TL;DR: If … Read more
HC 4.10 has just been released and with it come a whole host of excellent new features. You can read the release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-HCX/4.10/rn/vmware-hcx-410-release-notes/index.html In this post, I want to concentrate on what will be welcome to customers who operate their own private datacentres and have no use for encryption. Historically, the traffic between … Read more