vExpert 2026 — Why Sharing What You Learn Still Matters
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 home to 24 vExperts in 2026, making it the second largest company in the world by vExpert count. That is a remarkable reflection of the knowledge-sharing culture ITQ has built, and being surrounded by that many passionate VMware community contributors makes it a great place to work and grow.
What is vExpert?
The VMware vExpert program is Broadcom’s global evangelism and advocacy program. It recognises individuals who have significantly contributed to the VMware community through blogging, speaking at events, creating content, participating in forums, or simply helping others around them. It is not a technical certification — it is awarded for community contribution and knowledge sharing.
Every year applicants submit an application detailing what they have done for the community, and a panel reviews and selects the recipients. There are currently over 1,500 vExperts worldwide, spread across more than 90 countries.
What I have been working on
As a Consultant at ITQ, the past year has been filled with real-world VMware Cloud Foundation deployments and migrations at customer sites. Working hands-on with VCF across different environments and scales gives you a very different perspective than documentation alone — you run into edge cases, API quirks, and operational challenges that only show up in production. That experience is what drives the tooling I build and share.
A lot of the automation I have published grew directly out of customer project work — repetitive tasks that deserved a proper solution rather than a runbook. Some of the tools I have been building and sharing with the community:
- HostPrep.ps1 — automates ESXi host preparation before commissioning into SDDC Manager, covering NTP, certificate regeneration, SSL thumbprint capture and HTML reporting. Built to handle dozens of hosts consistently across customer deployments.
- Commission-VCFHosts.ps1 — companion script that drives host commissioning into VCF via the SDDC Manager API, removing the manual steps from the process entirely.
- New-VCFWorkloadDomain.ps1 — generates and validates VCF 9 workload domain JSON payloads, with built-in validation to catch issues before they reach the API.
- HCLCompatibilityReport.ps1 — queries the Broadcom Compatibility Guide API to validate customer hardware against a target ESXi version before a project starts, avoiding surprises mid-deployment.
- Get-FCHBAPathState.ps1 — audits Fibre Channel HBA path states across ESXi hosts, useful for pre- and post-migration validation on customer storage environments.
All of these are freely available on GitHub. If they save you time on a project, that is exactly the point.
Why community matters
The VMware and VCF ecosystem is complex. Documentation covers the happy path, but the real-world edge cases — the API quirks, the validation failures, the things that only show up in a lab at 11pm — those get solved by the community sharing what they find. That is what this blog is for, and that is what motivates me to keep publishing.
If something I have written or built has saved you time, I would love to hear about it. And if you have spotted something that could be done better, open an issue or a PR on GitHub — that kind of feedback is exactly what makes these tools sharper.
Thank you
Thank you to Broadcom and the vExpert program team for continuing to run this initiative. Thank you also to everyone who has read a post, shared a script, left a comment, or reached out on social media — it all adds up and it keeps this going.
Here is to another year of solving real problems and sharing what we learn. 🧡
You can find all my scripts and tools on GitHub. If you want to stay up to date with new posts, bookmark hollebollevsan.nl.
