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vCenter Server Identity Federation with Keycloak Identity Provider without SCIM

01.21.2025 by William Lam // 3 Comments

After publishing my recent article about using Authentik as an Identity Provider (IdP) for vCenter Server, which I have recieved a lot of positive feedback both internally (including a small typo note from my VP πŸ˜… ) and externally, I had several folks ask whether the same could also be accomplished with another popular open source IdP called Keycloak.

While I have not personally worked with Keycloak before, I know it is a popular identity provider solution for modern applications, especially within a Kubernetes environment. After getting Keycloak up and running, I found out that it does NOT have support for a System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) server, which is used to automatically synchronize your users and groups from your IdP to your clients, which would be vCenter Server in this case.

While there are a couple of 3rd party SCIM providers for Keycloak such as this one, they were either out of date or just did not work for me and after a few hours of troubleshooting, I eventually gave up. It certainly would have been nice to have SCIM server out of the box with a nice UX like Authentik.

I figured I was completely out of luck with using Keylock as an IdP for vCenter Server, because it needs to know about the users before you can assign vSphere Permissions. As a last resort, I pinged a few folks from our IdP team to see if there were any tricks I that I could leverage given the lack of SCIM server support. It turns out since vCenter Server uses the Identity Broker (vIDB) for Identity Federation, there is an option for manually publishing users into vIDB by leveraging its APIs! 🀩

Disclaimer: Keycloak is currently not an officially supported vCenter Server IdP, please use at your own risk.

[Read more...]

Categories // VCSA, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere, vSphere 8.0 Tags // Identity Provider, Keycloak, OAuth, OIDC, vCenter Server

vCenter Server Identity Federation with Authentik Identity Provider

01.13.2025 by William Lam // 2 Comments

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? πŸ€”

Hint: It works! 😁

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

[Read more...]

Categories // VCSA, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere, vSphere 8.0 Tags // Authentik, Identity Provider, OAuth, OIDC, SCIM, vCenter Server

Easier method to simulate custom ESXi SMBIOS hardware strings

01.06.2025 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Happy 2025! πŸŽ‰ Here is a fun one to kick off the New Year ☺️

Last year, I demonstrated a method for customizing the SMBIOS hardware string using Nested ESXi, but the solution was not perfect and required hacking up a VM ROM file and it was also limited to using the BIOS firmware for your Nested ESXi VM as the behavior for EFI firmware was different.

I was doing some research towards the end of last year and I came across a much more elegant solution that works for both physical and virtual ESXi!

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, Nested Virtualization Tags // Nested ESXi, SMBIOS

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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