• Claude Commissions a VCF Host

    calendar May 12, 2026 · 8 min read  ·
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    Like many others, I jumped on the MinisForum MS-A2 train a few months ago. I swapped out my Dell r740xd which was a single host management domain, with 3x MS-A2s. In general, these have been performing really well. When I put a host into maintenance mode, things can get a little slow, but I've been really happy with …
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  • ScarGuard: Vibecoding a Heron Deterrent That Actually Works

    calendar Apr 18, 2026 · 8 min read  ·
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    About a year ago, a great blue heron ate more than ten of my goldfish. I watched it happen - well, I watched the aftermath. One morning I walked out to the pond and the population had just... changed. Great blue herons are patient, methodical hunters. A single bird can empty a pond in a morning.

    While a number of …


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  • Reset the VCF NSX svc Account

    calendar Jan 5, 2026 · 2 min read  ·
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    Last week, I ran into an issue in my lab when trying to commission additional hosts. After some digging, I realized that SDDC Manager was having trouble communicating with the NSX Manager for my management domain. In VCF Operations, my Fleet Management tasks were filled with messages indicating that the connection to …
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  • Aria Ops: Reporting from the API

    calendar Mar 7, 2025 · 3 min read  ·
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    Have you ever wished you could see your infrastructure’s performance data in more detail than the standard hourly reports? I did too. That’s why I built a simple PowerShell solution that leverages the Aria Ops API to pull metrics at 5-minute intervals - giving you access to a level of insight that out-of-the-box …
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  • Failed Aria Automation Upgrade Prep

    calendar Nov 5, 2024 · 2 min read  ·
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    I went to upgrade Aria Automation from 8.18 to 8.18.1 in my lab the other day and got blocked by an error I hadn't seen before and unfortunately, LCM and a KB search didn't provide much in the way of help. I decided to check and see what information the command line might have for me. After SSHing in and utilizing …
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  • Resolving a 403 Error in Aria Automation Config with vIDM Integration

    calendar Dec 14, 2023 · 2 min read  ·
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    The other day, I took a leap and activated the IDM integration for my Aria Automation Config instance, after months of punting it down the road and just logging in as root. Unfortunately, once I activated the integration I immediately got a 403 error once I tried to login!


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  • vRealize Automation fails to install Salt Minion

    calendar Mar 11, 2022 · 2 min read  ·
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    I was attempting to leverage the saltConfiguration property in a vRA Cloud Template and ran into an issue where vRA would deploy the VM and then fail with an error indicating that the Salt Minion deploy failed. I was particularly puzzled by this because the cloud template I was using had worked previously, so it was a …
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  • Tag Based Affinity Rules

    calendar Jun 15, 2021 · 6 min read  ·
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    vROPS has a feature called Business Intent, which allows us to control the placement of virtual machines through the use of vSphere tags. Business intent allows us to control the placement of machines on a cluster basis or a host basis, allowing you to optimize the performance and placement of vms in accordance with …
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  • How to find properties in the Code Stream output schema

    calendar Apr 9, 2021 · 1 min read · codestream  ·
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    I've been doing a bit of work in Code Stream lately, and was running into some issues with a pipeline I built a while ago, but had updated the Cloud Template it was interacting with, as a result of these changes in the template I was now getting the error message Unable to resolve task input property : …
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  • Auto scaling your application with the vRealize Suite

    calendar Jan 13, 2021 · 5 min read · vra vro vrops  ·
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    When I was advocating for vRealize Automation while in my previous role, a frequent question I was asked by application owners was: "Can I auto scale my application, like <insert cloud provider here> allows me to?" This question often lead to defensive responses on my part.
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