A customer recently asked me a question about vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) image updates on a standalone ESXi host. It’s a good one, and the documentation didn’t completely answer it. The Question Their manual patching workflow looked like this: They wanted to know whether vLCM could handle this for them.…
This is a follow-up to a previous post, where I stood up a new single-node VMware Salt deployment to replace my old Aria Automation Config setup. This post covers the actual cutover: moving every existing minion in the homelab from the old master (cm-config-01) to the new one (cm-vcfsalt-01). The…
A couple of years ago I ran SaltStack Config (later rebranded Aria Automation Config) in my homelab for automated Linux patching. For various reasons, I stopped maintaining it and reverted to rather infrequent, manual patching. Recently I decided it was time to get back into automated patching. My old Salt…
Most of my lab runs on Ubuntu VMs built and updated through Packer, but a recent project called for a Rocky Linux template. Since this isn’t something I expect to repeat often, I didn’t want to invest time building out a Packer pipeline for it – I built the template…
I’ve been spending some time working with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 in my lab environment. The lab consists of several nested ESXi hosts that use NFS storage provided by a virtual machine. The VM providing the NFS storage, in turn, uses a consumer-grade NVMe SSD for its storage. Recently,…