In a full VCF fleet, a lot happens without anyone asking for it. The Installer deploys VCF Operations, its Cloud Proxy and a License Server at bring-up, Fleet lifecycle registers every vCenter with VCF Operations, and SDDC Manager drives the upgrade phase by phase. Run VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) 9.1 without VCF Management Services —…
The conversations I keep having with customers about a VMware upgrade aren’t about whether to do it — they’re about the specifics: which phase comes before which, what breaks if you skip a step, what to do about the parts that don’t fit the standard sequence. That’s planning work, and it’s different every time depending…
The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 Installer does a lot for you. The Planning & Preparation workbook asks for the rest. Between those two, though, sits a band of work that neither one covers: infrastructure you have to build before bring-up, Day-N components that deploy from their own wizards, and manual configuration steps that nothing in…
Here is a small, annoying truth about VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1: any version table you write down is wrong within a few weeks. In 9.1 the components no longer move as one bundle. Each one patches on its own cadence through Express Patches, asynchronously, in its own release-notes tree. So the moment you paste “the…
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…
Update — July 2026 (HostPrep.ps1 v4.1.1): the SSH plumbing has changed twice since I first published this. v4.1.0 dropped the Posh-SSH module in favour of the built-in Windows OpenSSH client, and v4.1.1 switched the actual authentication to the root password over that same client, because ESXi 9 removed the HTTPS endpoint the old key install…
