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vCenter Server Identity Federation with Authentik Identity Provider

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While answering a recent question on the VMware Reddit Community, I came to learn about Authentik, an open source identity provider (IdP), which is pretty feature rich and best of all, you can self-host the Authentik IdP solution.

While Authentik is not one of the officially supported Identity Providers for vCenter Server Identity Federation such as Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft ADFS or PingFederate, I was curious if it would to allow me to easily play with the Identity Federation feature in vCenter Server? ?

Hint: It works! ?

Disclaimer: Authentik is currently not an officially supported vCenter Server IdP as mentioned earlier, please use at your own risk.

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How to distinguish between classic vSphere VMs vs vSphere Supervisor Pod VMs? 

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Not all vSphere-based VMs are the same! This is especially true with the introduction of vSphere Supervisor (formally known as vSphere IaaS or vSphere with Tanzu or Project Pacific) which includes a modern way of provisioning a traditional/classic VM but also a new VM-based form factor known as vSphere Pod VMs.


There was a recent question internally about how you could you distinguish between traditional/classic VMs built from vSphere UI or API versus the vSphere Pod VMs using PowerCLI and specifically using the default Get-VM cmdlet?

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Homelab Hardware Options

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I have been getting a ton of inquiries lately, both internally as well as externally for hardware recommendations for building a new or updating an existing homelab/test environment to be able to deploy the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) solution. I typically receive at least half a dozen inquiries per week about general VMware Homelabs, but it has increased in volume lately, perhaps it was due to the recent US Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales or perhaps some are preparing for VCF 9 already?

In any case, I normally point users to my crowdsourced VMware Community Homelab Project, where users can submit their hardware build-of-materials (BOM), overall cost and the VMware solutions they are currently using.


While the VMware Community Homelab Project has been running for several years now and has helped numerous users, the majority of the submissions typically focus on subset of the VMware portfolio and only handful of submissions have included VCF and more importantly, some of the submissions are several years old.

Internally, a number of folks have shared more recent BOMs for building an environment to run the latest VCF 5.x release and I have also found several folks outside of VMware doing the same, so I thought it would be useful and timely to aggregate some of their hardware configurations to help give users an idea of what works and options as they are looking to revamp their lab going into 2025.

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