VMware vSphere 8 and ESXi 8 reach the end of general support on 11 October 2027. After that, Broadcom will ship no more patches, bug fixes, or security updates, and you won’t be able to open a support case. That is twelve months from the day I am writing this, and for most infrastructure teams, … Read more
Seven ESXi hosts, a vSAN cluster, an NSX Manager cluster with two edges, an NSX ALB controller, a vCloud Director cell, a Veeam server, a three-node Proxmox cluster, a three-node Hyper-V failover cluster, two top-of-rack switches, and the iLO and iDRAC boards behind the servers. That is the dummy site in the screenshots, and the … Read more
Broadcom’s VCF 9.1 Memory Tiering post, published in May 2026, says enterprise DDR5 RDIMM costs have surged since 2023 and that a high-density virtualization node now costs more than twice as much as it did. I already went through the 2026 memory and flash price numbers in my post vSphere Standard Is Coming Back, and … Read more
Series: Building Resilient SAP Infrastructure on VCF In Part 1, I laid out the four-site, four-layer architecture. In Part 2, I built the floor: two stretched domains across Site A and Site B, vSAN ESA under the management plane, NetApp MetroCluster NFS under the SAP workloads, and three referees at Site C. Everything in those … Read more
I added a second node to an Ootbi cluster in the lab this week. The flow is short and mostly gets out of your way, but a firewall rule or a certificate will decide whether it goes smoothly, so here it is with the screens in front of you. The node came up on 1.7.82.12645. … Read more
This week two things happened on the same day. VMware confirmed it will release an updated vSphere Standard, and Proxmox announced 24/7 enterprise support plus a North American subsidiary. There is no indication that either was a response to the other. Together they say more about the lower end of the virtualization market than almost … Read more
As always, when I run into an issue that takes real troubleshooting before I can fix it, and the result is something others can learn from, I mark it down as a good subject for a blog post. This “NSX Distributed Firewall Memory Exhaustion at Scale” one is very much that case. We had an … Read more
VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2 (management domain) Here is a scenario that looks trivial but is not. You reset the root password on your management domain vCenter. Maybe it expired, maybe you were rotating it, maybe you just did not know the old one. The reset itself works fine. And then SDDC Manager quietly breaks. The … Read more
Series: Building Resilient SAP Infrastructure on VCF In Part 1, I laid out the overall architecture: four sites, four layers of high availability, and a separate recovery site built on Veeam and Object First Ootbi. That post was the map. This blog post Building Resilient SAP Infrastructure on VCF — Part 2: Compute and Storage … Read more
This blog post, VCF 9.1: The Features That Actually Matter If You Run VCF, is not a walkthrough of every new feature. A look at the changes that actually affect how you run the platform, from someone who does. VCF 9.1 shipped on May 5, and if you read the release notes end to end, … Read more
