Latest posts
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VMSA-2026-0006: Critical vCenter Auth Bypass and ESX Escape, Patch This Week
VMSA-2026-0006 landed on 29 July 2026 with patches for VMware ESX, vCenter, Workstation and Fusion. Here is what is confirmed so far, and the exact order I patch vSphere in when an advisory like this drops.
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vCenter Recovery Playbook – Resetting Passwords, Renewing Certificates, and Running Lifecycle Updates
Every vCenter admin eventually hits one of these situations: a locked SSO account, an expired root password, certificates going red in the UI, or a VAMI update that needs to run. This post covers all three, password recovery, certificate renewal, and lifecycle updates, with the exact steps that actually work on vCenter Server 8.0. Part…
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ESXi Network Performance Tweaks – Jumbo Frames, vmxnet3, TSO, and More
Out-of-the-box ESXi networking is functional, but it’s not necessarily optimised for high-throughput or low-latency workloads. There are a handful of settings that most environments should review, some are straightforward one-time changes, others require careful planning across your entire network stack. This post covers the practical ones that actually move the needle. vmxnet3 – Start Here…
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VMware Aria Operations for Logs – Deploy, Configure, and Stop Flying Blind on vSphere Logs
If you’ve ever SSHed into a vCenter or ESXi host and grep’d through /var/log trying to figure out what happened 20 minutes ago, you already understand the problem that Aria Operations for Logs (formerly vRealize Log Insight) solves. It’s a centralised log aggregation and analysis platform built specifically for VMware environments, but it handles any…
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How to Patch vCenter Server 8.0 to the Latest 2025 Release
How to Patch vCenter Server 8.0 to the Latest 2025 Release Published December 15, 2025 | VMware / vSphere | ~12 min read I’ve run this process across a few client sites and a couple of home lab builds. VAMI is genuinely the path of least resistance here, provided your network isn’t doing anything weird.…
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Getting Started with VMware Aria Operations – Deploy, Connect, and Start Monitoring
VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations Manager) is VMware’s platform for performance monitoring, capacity management, and troubleshooting across your vSphere environment. If you’ve never deployed it, the initial setup can feel like a lot of moving parts. This post walks through a clean deployment from OVA to a functioning monitoring environment, including connecting vCenter and…
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NIC Teaming and Failover on ESXi – Load Balancing Algorithms Explained
NIC teaming is one of those topics where people often set it and forget it, usually leaving the default and hoping for the best. That works fine until something goes wrong, or until someone asks you why one of four NICs is handling 90% of the traffic while the others sit idle. Understanding the load…
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VLANs on ESXi – EST, VST, and VGT Explained with Real Config Examples
VLAN configuration on ESXi trips people up more than it should, mostly because there are three different tagging modes and choosing the wrong one causes silent connectivity failures that are annoying to debug. This post breaks down all three modes (EST, VST, and VGT) with real configuration examples so you know exactly what to set…
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vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) – Centralised Networking at Scale
If you’ve outgrown standard switches, or you just got handed a vSphere environment with a VDS already in place, this post is for you. The vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS, sometimes called DVS) is VMware’s enterprise-grade virtual switching platform. It shifts network configuration out of individual hosts and into vCenter, which changes the whole management model…
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ESXi Standard Switches (vSS) – The Networking Foundation Every VMware Admin Should Know
If you’ve spent any time working with ESXi hosts, you’ve run into virtual switches whether you realised it or not. The first time you deployed a VM and it just… had network access, that was a vSphere Standard Switch (vSS) doing its job quietly in the background. I want to dig into how these things…