Using ADFS with vCenter 7

A while ago I wrote an article about using LDAPS to connect vCenter to Active Directory. In that article, I mentioned a second (secure) option to connect to AD: by using ADFS. In this article, I will give you the steps to change your vCenter Identity Provider from Embedded to…

Network Port Diagram vSphere

I was troubleshooting an issue with an ESXi host and Update Manager for which I needed the firewall ports. In KB2131180 you can find a PDF document with a beautiful diagram and reference table. But getting all the required ports between a specific source and destination was not easy. So…

Windows Server 2019 customization issue

I was asked by a colleague to help him with a problem he had customizing a Windows Server 2019 deployment. He had no problem customizing a Window Server 2016 VM so had no idea what the problem was. The first thing I did was a manual deployment. I created a…

Packer and WinRM – mystery resolved

A while ago I started exploring Hashicorp Packer in order to learn more about a new way of creating Windows template VMs. Traditionally, you create a VM, attach the Windows ISO file and of you go… But with Packer, you can define the whole thing in code and store that…

Using LDAPS with vCenter and AD

Most companies that connect vCenter to Active Directory are using the Integrated Windows Authentication. At least, that’s what I see. But both VMware and Microsoft have announced changes that are going to change the way you connect your vCenter to AD. VMware announced in the vSphere 7 release notes that…

Backup your homelab… for free!

I was already using the free Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows to make a backup of my personal computer to a share on a server running Windows Server. But I didn’t make a backup of my ESXi server running several VMs for my lab environment. When I downloaded the latest…

Remediation did not succeed

I was patching a lot of ESXi hosts but had some trouble with one of the clusters. Remediation did not work and in the Events for the first host I saw two events:Could not install patches on <host name>Remediation did not succeed for <host name> A quick search on the…

Troubleshooting Host Profiles

A while ago I was working with host profiles to get the hosts compliant with the CIS Benchmarks (https://www.cisecurity.org/benchmark/vmware/). But for some reason, I could not remediate some of the hosts. Issue #1 The error I got was pretty generic… I started looking at log files and decided to download…

ESXi Events flooded… Firewall configuration has changed.

I was investigating an event that would appear every two minutes, flooding the Events on the host. So the first event in the sequence is “Port vmk1 is now protected by Firewall”. Followed by “Firewall configuration has changed. Operation ‘allowall’ for rule set iSM succeeded” and finally “Firewall configuration has…