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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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Decoding vSphere (vCenter/ESXi), vSAN & Tanzu License Keys

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For most users, you probably have a large collection of vSphere license keys that have been provisioned over the years and keeping track of the product SKU, entitled features and capacity can be a challenge, especially if you are just looking at the raw 25 character license string.

While the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) is recommended for all license management operations(view, split, merge, etc), did you know you could also use vCenter Server to help decode a particular license key?

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Retrieving VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version from vCenter Server?

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Have you ever worked on something before and several years later, you have totally forgotten about it!? That is exactly the story behind this recent question on finding the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version by using vCenter Server.

Obviously, the most logical place to look for the version of VCF is by using SDDC Manager which can be found within the VCF Workload Domain UI as shown in the screenshot below:


You can also get the VCF version by using the VCF API which can easily be retrieved with PowerVCF (PowerShell Module for VCF) using the Get-VCFManager function.


It was only after answering the question did I realized that you CAN also retrieve the VCF version by using vCenter Server and not only that, this method of retrieval was a solution that I had proposed and was implemented back in 2017!

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