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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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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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Quick Tip - vSAN ESA Cluster Health Check returns Error message: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

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A fellow colleague was having some problems with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) CLI Installer when using the vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) bootstrap method, which automatically the configures vSAN ESA on a physical ESXi host before deploying the VCSA on top of the vSAN ESA Datastore.


Whether he manually downloaded the vSAN JSON HCL or generated his own custom vSAN ESA HCL, the VCSA Installer would fail with the following error:

Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

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