Technology Posts


  • Bundle Transfer Utility (v 5.2) Cheat Sheet
    Overview I have a couple other posts on my site regarding this tool. The documentation in the wild is…well wild. Unfortunately, the vendor doesn’t make the instructions very clear, at least for the paths to use when uploading to SDDC Manager. This could be just me, but I have a suspicion that more than a…
  • Bundle Transfer Utility (v 5.2)
    Introduction Here we go again with this utility…still a hot mess and not well documented. When you download the Bundle Transfer Utility from the Broadcom Support site, the filename will be lcm-tool-prod.tar.gz. When you actually use the tool (I am using Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS), it will present the name OBTU, which I assume is Offline…
  • VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) (Avi)
    Overview So besides all the variations of product names in play, pre-Broadcom acquisition and post, there is something that has been baffling me for quite some time. How to create the globalenvironment in VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle using VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) (Avi) as the load balancer. Installation Issues Things I am still…
  • iXsystems TrueNAS CORE and VMware
    Overview iXsystems publishes a White Paper, titled TrueNAS for VMware, which provides Best Practices for VMware. In this post, I am going to breakdown each of the best practices with an example. Hopefully this will help others, newcomers and experts, alike, at an optimally configured TrueNAS. For me, it will help ease the pain of…
  • Networking with Nested ESXi Hosts
    Overview I recently had to add an additional host to my lab as I was running out of compute (thank you VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and all the things…Aria Suite (specifically the clustered VMware Identity Manager), NSX, Avi Load Balancer). In addition to getting the additional host, I was fortunate enough to also upgrade the…