I recently upgraded a customer’s VCF test environment from 5.1.2.1 to 5.2.2.0. The SDDC Manager upgrade itself completed without problem, but when I moved on to Bundle Management to download the remaining update bundles, the list was empty and the UI only showed: If you search online, you’ll likely end up at Broadcom KB 409707,… Read More SDDC Manager 5.2.2.0 – “Retrieving available bundles failed”
An hour after celebrating a successful validation in the VCF 9.0 installer and getting ready for real deployment testing (which I made a short LinkedIn post about yesterday), things went sideways. My first deployment attempt of the management domain with just vCenter, SDDC Manager, and NSX, failed when it reached the NSX step, with an… Read More Greenfielding VCF 9.0.0.0 Management Domain Fails with NSX Install Image Error
After patching two vIDM clusters with CSP-97577 (and addressing the known issues), I encountered an unexpected alert in SDDC Manager the following day: “3 accounts have been disconnected. Visit Password Management page to take action.” Clicking Manage took me to the Password Management page, where all three vIDM nodes were listed as disconnected. My first… Read More SDDC Manager Flags Account(s) as Disconnected After vIDM CSP‑97577 Patch
🔄 Update 2025-08-04 Broadcom have released a new KB 406032 – “VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18 Patch 3 Installation Runbook” confirming the /etc/fstab problem described her, and also a new potential problem with a missing GPG key. 📌 Overview With the recent security and bugfix updates from Broadcom (I posted about it here), I applied… Read More Preventing “Failed to mount /boot” after Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18.0 PATCH3 Upgrade
📌 Overview Broadcom has issued VMSA‑2025‑0014, a security advisory addressing a denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE‑2025‑41241) in VMware vCenter Server. The advisory was published on July 29, 2025. In parallel, Broadcom released updates for multiple VMware products to address this and other issues. 📢 Update July 31, 2025: Heads up on ASLCM PATCH3. You need to manually… Read More Broadcom releases VMware VMSA‑2025‑0014 Security Advisory and multiple VMware product releases
Summary: Upgrading Dell servers equipped with QLogic QL41xxx network adapters to ESX 9, using either the Dell AddOn 9.0.0.0-A00 or the Dell-customized ESX 9 ISO, will remove the QL41xxx vmnic driver, effectively disabling network connectivity. A workaround for this issue (driver reinstallation) is provided below. ⚠️Note: this is not a supported configuration for running ESX… Read More ESX 9 Compatibility Issues with Dell Servers and QL41xxx NICs
After upgrading a VCF 4.5 management domain to 5.1 for a customer, upgrading NSX to v4.1.2.1.0 in the process, we saw that NSX suddenly listed a lot of expired certificates, which wasn’t there before (actually they were, just not showing up and there are no alerts for those in NSX 3.x). Troubleshooting this, I came… Read More Fixing expired NSX self-signed certificates after upgrading from NSX-T 3.2.x to NSX 4.x (VCF 5.1)
During a bring-up of a small VCF 5.0 test-environment for a customer, with 4 hosts for MGMT-WLD and 4 hosts for VI-WLD, I hit a snag when creating the VI workload domain from SDDC Manager. The subtask “Validate Workload Domain Deployment Specification” failed. If you’re not interesting in going through some digging with me, you… Read More VCF 5.0 Workload Domain creation fails with “Validate Workload Domain Deployment Specification” subtask
I was doing a precheck before upgrading SDDC Manager v4.4.0.0-feb10 to v4.4.0.0-apr15 (drift bundle) and the precheck failed, as shown below in the screenshot I found this strange, as the backups are running fine to my sftp-backup host. After a little digging, I found out that there is a local backup user on the SDDC… Read More VCF precheck failures – Backup user password validity
If you run your VMware vSphere or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack on Dell EMC VxRail (VCFonVxRail), you are maybe familiar with the vxverify and vcfverify tools (requires login), which can come in handy for checking the health of your VCF and VxRail systems, both ad-hoc and before doing an upgrade. I won’t go into… Read More VCF Verify / VxVerify – “vxnode: vxnode.config drives missing”
VMnic 