Resolve Unable to find PowerShell! on VS Code for macOS

I recently moved over to an Apple Silicon-based Macbook Pro, and after installing Visual Studio Code and Powershell (pwsh), I was prompted with the following error. Unable to find PowerShell! Do you have it installed? You can also configure custom installations with the ‘powershell.powerShellAdditionalExePaths’ setting. Fortunately, the fix is straightforward. First, open up Terminal (zsh)…

Continue Reading

Automate Free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate Replacement for vSphere 8

Due to popular demand, I have updated the vCenter SSL Installation script with some significant enhancements. (Once again Credit to Ryan Bolger – https://github.com/rmbolger for the Posh-ACME module). This update now checks for prerequisites and installs them. In addition, it now supports vSphere 7 and vSphere 8. The latest version of Install-vCenterSSL.ps1, generates certificates and then…

Continue Reading

Bypass macOS Security Gatekeeper for vCenter Installer

If you are hitting this error while trying to launch the VCSA Installer, “Installer” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should eject the disk image. This is most likely just macOS Security Gatekeeper getting in the way, don’t worry the fix is simple! Note: This issue also affects the CLI Installer too. To have…

Continue Reading

Instant Cloned ESXi for My VMware Homelab

Nested Virtualisation has come a long way over the past 15 years. I remember hacking away at VMware Workstation to run ESX 3.5 and then run a guest VM nested on top of that just because I could. Although VMware does not officially support Nested Virtualisation for production use, the capability is native these days….

Continue Reading

Export Machine SSL Embedded Private Key From vCenter

This quick post demonstrates how to export the Machine SSL embedded Private key from your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). If you replaced the default Machine SSL certificate on your vCenter where the CSR was generated from the vCenter Server, the private key would be embedded in the vCenter Appliance certificate store. If you need to…

Continue Reading

Create a Bootable ESXi 8 USB Installer on macOS

With the release of vSphere 8, some of you may need a solution for creating a bootable USB installer for ESXi 8 on macOS without using a 3rd party utility. You will be happy to know that my previous blog post Create a Bootable ESXi 7 USB Installer on macOS, still works perfectly. Note this…

Continue Reading

Remove certificates with weak signature algorithms in vCenter Server

During the vCenter Server 8.0 upgrade, I was faced with the following Pre-upgrade check error and wasn’t able to continue the upgrade. As of vCenter Server 8.0, certificates with SHA-1 signature algorithms are no longer supported and must be removed or replaced with a certificate that uses SHA-2 signature algorithm. In this post, I’ll show…

Continue Reading

Change ESXi 7 System Storage Installation Size

Just a quick post on changing the system storage media size for ESXi 7.0 Installation. As of ESXi 7.0, a new partition layout was introduced and the installation can now consume up to 138GB of storage to allow for new features and enhancments to be added in future releases. The partition is auto-sized depending on…

Continue Reading

Efficiently Scale HCI with vSAN HCI Mesh

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has solved many challenges with complex cloud infrastructure deployments for IT businesses over the years. Combining virtualised storage, compute, network, and management into a unified system, offers simplified management, streamlined operations, scalability, security, and out-of-the-box infrastructure automation, delivering rapid scalability to meet business-critical demands. However, it can be challenging to right-size the…

Continue Reading

Customise ESXi Image Profiles using vCenter Image Builder UI

Customising ESXi image profiles is helpful when you need to add custom drivers to your ESXi installation image. I will demonstrate in this post, how to customise ESXi image profiles using the built-in Image Builder service on vCenter 7. I usually use Powershell to build customised ESXi images; however, non-windows users might find this handy…

Continue Reading