If you have ever prepared a VMware Cloud Foundation deployment, you know the moment: someone sends over the official Broadcom Planning and Preparation Workbook, an Excel file with nine deeply technical sheets and hundreds of fields. FQDNs, VLANs, CIDRs, BGP AS numbers, certificate templates, service accounts — all of it, in one flat spreadsheet, and most…
This week I traded customer work for the Amsterdam Marriott and spent five days at Broadcom Activate (22–26 June), on the PS/EAP practitioner track — the one aimed squarely at the people who actually design, build, and run complex VCF environments in the field. As an ITQ consultant, that’s my corner of the world, so…
I am proud to share that I have been awarded the VMware vExpert 2026 title by Broadcom. Being part of the vExpert community is something I genuinely value, and receiving this recognition for another year means a lot. I am also proud to be part of ITQ, where I work as a Consultant. ITQ is…
If you have ever spent time carefully building custom roles in vCenter — defining exactly which privileges a monitoring account, a backup service, or a Tanzu user needs — you know how tedious it is to recreate those same roles on a second vCenter. There is no native export button in the vSphere Client. You…
The Problem Anyone who has spent time managing VMware vSphere environments knows the pain of VLAN validation. You’ve just rolled out a new set of port groups, migrated a batch of VMs, or made changes to your distributed switch configuration — and now you need to verify that each VLAN actually works end-to-end. The traditional…
Overview When commissioning ESXi hosts into SDDC Manager as part of a VMware Cloud Foundation 9 deployment, there are a handful of preparation steps that need to be done on every host before it can be added to the inventory. Doing this manually across a dozen or more hosts is tedious and error-prone, so I…
A set of three PowerShell scripts to export, import, and clean up NSX segmentsand segment profiles across any NSX environment — compatible with NSX 4.x and 9.x. GitHub: https://github.com/pauldiee/nsx-segment-migration Introduction Migrating NSX segments between environments is one of those tasks that soundsstraightforward until you are actually doing it. Move a handful of segments byhand and…
After setting up VIDB authentication and adding our AD groups to the administrators role we logged into vcenter with our own admin account and noticed we could not open the hosts section where you Commission hosts and add/edit Network pools: This is a rights issue with SDDC Manager, you have to add your admin accounts…
When using VCF9 there are multiple places to configure SFTP backup for some components. For SDDC Manager and NSX it is still somewhat the same as in VCF 5 but within “Operations – Administration – SDDC Manager – Backups”. Here you configure your external SFTP and setup schedule and retention periods for those 2 products….
When deploying VCF9 you can also run into an extended wait timeout when in phase of deploying Operations. If you then look into the domainmanager logfile you can see this error : this happens to be already document by Broadcom in the following KB article : https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/409008/the-firstboot-of-the-vcf-operations-coll.html Apparently the cloud collector HAproxy component tries to…
