I’ve recently been interested in creating a TinyCore Linux virtual appliance. This OVA would allow for some customization, like hostname, IP address, default gateway, and DNS settings. I’ve posted about TinyCore Linux before, most recently 2 years ago: https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/tinycore-15-virtual-machine-very-small-vm-for-testing/. I really enjoy this very lightweight VM as it works perfectly…
About a year ago, I published a post covering how to monitor a Raspberry Pi using the open source Telegraf agent and VMware Aria Operations: https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/virtualization/monitoring-a-raspberry-pi-with-telegraf-and-aria-operations Recently, while rebuilding this configuration in a VCF 9.1 environment, I encountered a couple of changes that required updates to the original process: The…
The VCF PowerCLI 9.1 release notes call out an interesting change to the Connect-VIServer cmdlet (https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-1/release-notes/vmware-cloud-foundation-9-1-0-0-release-notes/what-s-new/whats-new-vcf-cli-api-sdk/vcf-powercli-changelog/vmware-vimautomation-core.html) Connect-VIServer– Added parameter ‘VcfApiToken’– Added parameter ‘VcfOAuthSecurityContext’ This change introduces native support for API token authentication in federated VCF environments, making non-interactive automation significantly easier than previous SAML-based approaches. In a prior post (https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/how-to-use-powercli-with-federated-vcenter-logins/),…
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…