Amazon Elastic VMware Service is not automatically a cloud strategy. Sometimes it is a landing zone. Sometimes it is a disaster recovery target. Sometimes it is a practical way to avoid a data center deadline. Sometimes it is a temporary bridge while application teams decide what to modernize. And sometimes it is just a cloud … Read more
Amazon Elastic VMware Service is easy to describe incorrectly. The shallow description is “VMware on AWS.” That is directionally true, but it misses the operational point. Amazon EVS is not just a place to run virtual machines. It is a way to place a VMware Cloud Foundation environment inside an AWS operating boundary, with Amazon … Read more
AI placement decisions become more useful when they move from opinion to architecture criteria. The first article in this series focused on the core inputs: data gravity, latency, sovereignty, and cost. Those inputs explain why some AI workloads belong in managed cloud services, some belong close to local infrastructure, and some need a private AI … Read more
A virtual machine file lock issue rarely shows up at a convenient time. It usually appears when a VM refuses to power on, a consolidation task is stuck, a backup window has overrun, or vCenter and an ESXi host disagree about the VM’s state. That is exactly when bad habits get expensive. The temptation is … Read more
A purple screen on an ESXi host creates an immediate operational problem, but the bigger risk is what happens next. The first reaction is usually to get the host back online. That is understandable, especially when workloads are down, HA is recovering virtual machines, or a cluster is running hot after losing capacity. But if … Read more
A full /storage/log partition on a vCenter Server Appliance is not just a housekeeping problem. It is a management-plane risk. In a standalone vSphere environment, it can interrupt administration, log collection, patching, and service stability. In VMware Cloud Foundation, the blast radius is larger because vCenter is tied into SDDC Manager workflows, workload domain lifecycle … Read more
Certificate changes in vSphere environments rarely fail in only one place. The obvious place to look is the browser warning, the expired certificate alarm, or the service that recently had its Machine SSL certificate replaced. But in production VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere environments, certificate changes can also break something less visible: the extension and … Read more
Raw Device Mappings tend to show up in the places where infrastructure history is still attached to the workload. A database server was moved from physical hardware years ago. A file server needed a very large LUN before VMDK limits improved. A clustered application depended on shared storage. A storage team wanted array-level tooling to … Read more
Disable vCLS on a Cluster via Retreat Mode KB 316514 vSphere Cluster Services usually stay in the background until they get in the way of something operational. Most teams first notice vCLS when a cluster task is blocked, a warning appears after maintenance, or a handful of small system VMs show up and someone asks … Read more
A vSphere Distributed Switch upgrade can look deceptively simple in the vCenter UI. Select the switch, choose the target version, confirm the warning, and move on. That is not how it should be treated in a brownfield environment. The risk is not that a DVS upgrade is always dangerous. The risk is that old distributed … Read more
Patching vCenter should not feel dramatic. The workflow in the Appliance Management Interface is straightforward: log in to VAMI, check for updates, stage, install, validate. Broadcom KB 316584 documents that basic path for vCenter Server 7.x and 8.x, including two patching options: using a URL-based repository or mounting a patch ISO as a local CD-ROM … Read more
You open the vSphere Client and instead of the inventory, you get a blunt message: Sometimes the symptom is more explicit. The login flow may fail with: Other times the vCenter Server Appliance looks partially alive from the outside, but core services will not come up after a reboot. In Broadcom KB316619, this pattern is … Read more
Storage failures in vSphere are rarely just “storage is down.” That phrase may be accurate from the application owner’s point of view, but it is not precise enough for the operator who has to decide what happens next. A host that has lost all paths to a datastore behaves differently from a host that has … Read more
Large VM migrations usually fail at the worst possible time: late in the change window, after the task has already consumed hours of storage, network, and operator attention. When the error is something like “Invalid configuration for device ‘##’,” the first instinct is to look for a broken virtual NIC, a missing port group, an … Read more
vCenter certificate failures tend to show up at the worst possible time: during an upgrade precheck, after a maintenance window has already started, when services will not start cleanly, or when a certificate alarm has been ignored long enough to become someone else’s emergency. The mistake is treating certificate recovery as a button-click exercise. The … Read more
Certificates in vSphere are easy to underestimate until they become the reason vCenter will not authenticate, services will not start cleanly, NSX loses trust in its Compute Manager, or SDDC Manager stops interacting with the management domain the way it should. That is why a VMCA reset should not be treated as a generic “renew … Read more
vCenter certificate problems rarely arrive as clean, isolated maintenance tasks. They usually show up as failed logins, services that refuse to start, upgrade prechecks that suddenly block progress, or downstream trust failures in NSX, SDDC Manager, backup tools, monitoring platforms, or automation. By the time an operator is searching for “Fixcerts,” the environment is often … Read more
