2026 VCF 9 Lab Update

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

Nested VCF on Minisforum MS-A2 deployment time

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

Upgrading HCX post 4.9 release

HCX 4.9 brought some licensing changes as well as offline/dark site support. Whilst it is still possible to upgrade using the well-known approach in the UI, you are now able to download the upgrade bundles. Whilst this is the only option for Local sites, it’s possible to use it for Connected sites, which might be … Read more

Single HCX site installation supporting OSAM Migrations (HCX Consolidated Architecture)

HCX OS Assisted Migration is a migration method within HCX where we can move supported guest OS VMs from a Hyper-V or KVM environment. The process to do so is once you have a functioning Service Mesh, you download a Sentinel agent and then install it on the VMs in scope for migration. Shortly afterwards, … Read more

HCX Bulk Migration for Single vCenter Server Topologies

Part way through the HCX 4.5 release notes it mentions the above with the following note: “In HCX 4.5, HCX can be deployed within a single vCenter Server to enable the Bulk migration. This is useful for cluster-to-cluster migrations in environments where the vendor compatibility or other requirements for cluster-to-cluster vMotion cannot be satisfied“ This, … Read more