In lab and small-scale environments, it’s common to rely almost entirely on VM-level backups. That’s exactly how my lab is built: a single virtual machine runs several services I depend on regularly, and it’s protected by a daily, CBT-enabled backup job. These backups are crash-consistent, efficient, and most of the…
Earlier this year, I created a post about using PowerCLI to connect to an environment that was configured for Entra ID authentication (https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/how-to-use-powercli-with-entra-id-federated-vcenter-logins/). I’ve recently deployed VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 in a lab, and with the help of a couple of blog posts (https://williamlam.com/2025/01/vcenter-server-identity-federation-with-keycloak-identity-provider-without-scim.html and https://williamlam.com/2025/06/vcf-9-0-single-sign-on-sso-with-keycloak-idp.html) was able to setup…
VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) is used within vSphere to secure connections between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts, but what if we need certificates for other systems? In a previous post, I used group policy to add the VMCA Root CA from a vCenter Server to the trusted enterprise root CAs…
In my lab I have a jump box that I typically use for management. It is joined to active directory and automatically trusts my primary CA root certificate. This CA issued the Machine SSL certificate for my vCenter Server, so when I go to that system I do not get…
Manually collecting log bundles from vCenter and hosts can be repetitive and time-consuming. Here’s how I automated the process with PowerCLI. I wanted a short script that would let me pick a vCenter server, then do the other relevant tasks: Troubleshooting: Underlying connection was closed When I attempted to use…