WilliamLam.com

Automating VCF 9.0 Single Sign-On (SSO) with OIDC-based Identity Provider

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Configuring VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Single Sign-On (SSO), introduced in VCF 9.0, can be quite lengthy, especially when you go through the workflow for the first time.


For my lab setup, I use Keycloak, a popular and free OIDC-based IdP, and have documented a step-by-step guide for using it with VCF SSO.

Even as an experienced user of VCF SSO, I find the configuration can still take several minutes, depending on your familiarity with the UI inputs. This is something I have wanted to automate for some time, but it meant digging into the private API calls used by the VCF Operations UI.

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Automating Lab Optimizations for Post-Deployment of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)

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After deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation environment in my lab, I typically apply a set of post-deployment configurations across components such as vCenter and NSX, depending on the specific scenarios I am testing.

I finally found some time to automate these manual tasks, as they were finally getting annoying but not annoying enough at the beginning to automate them immediately 😅

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Maximizing vSAN ESA Performance on Minisforum MS-A2

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I have been running the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 stack using the Minisforum MS-A2 in a three-node configuration for almost a year now. While the MS-A2 is not hardware that you would find on the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG), these units have been solid for my lab environment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been putting my lab through its paces while testing various VCF.Next deployment and upgrade scenarios, and I began to notice the environment was sluggish, which was not something I had experienced before.

Long story short, after hours of debugging, including over the weekend with the amazing Nicholas Wilson, we were able to pinpoint one of the issues (more details at the end for the other issue) related to the onboard 10GbE SFP+ adapters. The MS-A2 uses an Intel x710, which apparently have been quite notorious when it comes to hardware offload. 😵‍💫

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