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Quick Tip - Which vCenter Server Key Provider (KMS) is a VM using?

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vCenter Server requires a Key Management Service (KMS) for enabling VM Encryption, vTPM, or vSAN Encryption. Users have the choice of configuring the embedded Native Key Provider (NKP) built into vCenter Server and/or use an external KMS with the Standard Key Provider (SKP) option.


If you have more than one KMS configured in vCenter Server, you can specify one of the KMS key providers to be your default, which will automatically be used for any KMS-related activities. You can switch between the default KMS key provider and you can certainly specify a specific KMS key provider when using the vSphere API to provision a VM that will leverage VM encryption.

So how do you figure out which KMS key provider a VM is using?

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Automating bulk OPNsense Unbound DNS host overrides

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I recently deployed OPNsense in my homelab, which I will be using it to setup my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment. A critical part infrastructure service that is often miss-configured is DNS and OPNsense provides a simple way add your custom DNS entries (forward/reverse) called Host Overrides, which uses Unbound DNS behind the scenes.

Like most, I have a number of DNS entries that I would like to pre-create and the UI is not exactly the quickest for any type of "bulk" operation as each entry is added sequentially.


Luckily, OPNsense does have a REST API for Unbound functions, but the documentation was not very useful as it just direct users to use the browser to extract the JSON payload, while something I am comfortable with, I think that is not what I expected from something called an API Reference ...

In any case, this was a simple enough API, that I was able to create a quick PowerShell script to parse a CSV file that contains the list of FQDN, IP Address and Description and then perform a bulk create since the API itself was also sequential in nature 🙁

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Quick Tip - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Bringup fails without persistent ESX-OSData

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You will never run into this problem if you follow current recommended practices to install the ESX-OSData volume on a persistent storage device that could either be dedicated and/or co-located your ESXi installation.

For those deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab environment, you might attempt to reserve the limited number of storage devices for use with vSAN and decide to install ESXi on a USB device, which is perfectly fine but if you do not select a persistent storage device for the ESX-OSData volume, then it will default to use the ESXi ramdisk.

I recently observed that if you have such a configuration, the VCF Cloud Builder Bringup process will fail after attempting (three times) to re-deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).


As you can see from the screenshot above,  VCF Cloud Builder UI does not provide any details and ask users to look at the vCenter Server installation logs.

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