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Updated Nested ESXi 8.x & 9.0 Virtual Appliance

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Happy Sunday! Before the wave of announcements starts rolling out from VMware Explore Las Vegas, which starts tomorrow, I wanted to share a quick update. 😅

I have been pretty swamped for the past couple of months, so it has taken a bit more time to get the latest Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances published, but here are the latest 8.0 Update 3 and 9.0 versions. I have included the direct links to the download but also the intermediate Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) links for those interested in bookmarking these pages.

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vCenter Identity Federation with Authelia

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Gotta catch them all!? ?

Looks like I will be adding another identity provider to my existing collection of IdPs (Authentik, KeyCloak, Synology SSO, Pocket ID, Zitadel and Kanidm) that can be used with vCenter Server and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Identity Federation.

Authelia is another free and self-hosted IdP solution, which also supports Time-based one-time password (TOTP) out of the box and all configurations are managed in a couple of configuration files as there is no administrative web UI.

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vCenter Server Identity Federation with Kanidm

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Looks like I will be expanding my collection of identity providers (Authentik, KeyCloak, Synology SSO, Pocket ID and Zitadel) that can be used with vCenter Server and/or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Identity Federation!

Fellow colleague, Eric Gray just made me aware of another self-hosted IdP called Kanidm, which he had success setting up and thought I might be interested.


Kanidm is another basic free IdP that allows users to easily setup to play with vCenter Server and/or VCF Identity Federation, but what makes this IdP unique is that it is completely managed using a CLI, there is no web interface like ones listed above.

Additionally, Kanidm supports both traditional username/password authentication and modern passkeys. If you decide to use traditional passwords, Kanidm does require setting up Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) using something like Google Authenticator and provides another factor of authentication, which is pretty neat!

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