According to Uptime Institute’s 2026 Annual Outage Analysis, 57% of organisations responding to its 2025 survey said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000. For 20%, the cost exceeded $1 million. Those are substantial figures, particularly when you consider how dependent most businesses have become on...
Broadcom has introduced a new, standardised versioning approach for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), beginning with version 9.0. The aim is simple: remove confusion and make it much easier to understand releases, upgrades, and compatibility across the entire VCF stack. Previously, VCF versioning could feel fragmented, with different components...
After quite a few years I have outgrown my 2 Intel NUCs and SuperMicro E200-D servers. They have served me really well through the vSphere 8 journey and when the Aria Suite was originally released proved a huge help in uplifting skills from vRA7 to vRA8. But, like...
If you’ve been watching the VMware ecosystem evolve over the past year, you know it’s been a period of significant transition. With VMware now operating under Broadcom, the landscape is shifting—new strategies, new product focuses, and new opportunities are rapidly emerging. Amid all this change, one constant remains...
So, Broadcom is really pushing the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as the go-to platform for its biggest enterprise clients. This has sparked quite a discussion about whether it’s time to bring workloads back to on-premise Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) instead of keeping them in the public cloud. Sure,...
On the 29th July, patch 2 for Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.12 was released. The release notes can be found here: VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18 Patch 2 Release Notes Unusually, on the 6th August, patch 3 was then released. Pretty soon after hey? Release notes for patch 3...
What’s The Problem? This week a security announcement was published from Broadcom: VMSA-2025-0008: VMware Aria automation updates address a DOM based Cross-site scripting vulnerability (CVE-2025-22249) Affecting 3 products (VMware Aria Automation, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Telco Cloud Platform) with a CVSS Base Score of 8.2 I was working...
What’s The Problem? So I went to an SDDC Manager server this morning and found that the user interface page was dead in the water. Figure1: SDDC Manager Says No! So, being a simple kind of guy, I decided to first bounce the VM. I gave it a...
That’s Simple Isn’t It? A few versions back you could configure access to your myvmware.com account which meant you could easily download and import into the vRLCM appliance, the installable binaries for Aria products. This is no longer available. Figure1: You can no longer configure access to what...
The Issue After a power outage in my home lab I found that my vCenter server would no longer boot. An error in the console stated that there were issues with the file system and the System Check could not be started. Sounds pretty bad and I did...
An Introduction to Jobs In a series of posts, I am going to take you through setting up the Automation Config product, manually enabling management of deployed systems, creating a custom desired state and eventually integrating with your Cloud templates. This specific post will take you through the...
Manually Deploy Salt Minion In a series of posts, I am going to take you through setting up the Automation Config product, manually enabling management of deployed systems, creating a custom desired state and eventually integrating with your Cloud templates. This specific post will demonstrate how to install...
External Authentication In a series of posts, I am going to take you through setting up the Automation Config product, manually enabling management of deployed systems, creating a custom desired state and eventually integrating with your Cloud templates. This specific post will cover up configuring LDAP integration with...
Initial Deployment The Aria Automation Config system allows you to define the applications, files, and other settings that should be present on a given system. Once configured, the system is continuously evaluated against a configuration and changes are made as and when needed. Now tightly integrated into the...
In a series of posts, I am going to take you through setting up the Aria Automation Config product (formerly known as Salt), manually enabling management of deployed systems, creating a custom desired state and eventually integrating with your Cloud templates (and hopefully even more!) Series Overview Part...
Overview I recently wanted to create a template in vSphere that I would use from VMware Aria Automation. I did not want to use vSphere customisation specifications, but rather cloud-init (and just cloud-init). There are many posts out there all differing from one another on how to prepare...
Of late I have been working on a number of Cloud Templates that require quite an extensive set of custom properties to be set. These custom properties are used to enable further configuration to take place during the deployment process. Additionally, some contain computed values that are then...
I thought for a bit of a laugh I would challenge myself to create an ABX action to raise a Jira ticket when a deployment fails. In the end it wasn’t too difficult and it certainly shows that there could be some good further use cases for integration...
This cheat sheet will evolve over time to become a single source for all the things you forget, common questions with answers and anything else that might be useful. Look out for other cheat sheets for other products as well (coming soon) ! Operations How do I shut...
The release of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.6 contained a new feature that may have flown under your radar, but I believe is a great addition to an already great product. Introducing Outbound Notifications! Introducing Outbound Notifications This new feature enables you to configure Lifecycle Manager to send...
