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Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG)

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The Broadcom Compatibility Guide (formerly VMware Compatibility Guide) is where users would go to check hardware (new or existing) compatibility with VMware software.


There are a number of different compatibility guides that you can search through from CPU processors to servers to the various of I/O devices including accelerators and graphics cards. For users with a small number of hardware devices, search is pretty straight forward but if you have a variety of different hardware to check, the web interface may not be the quickest.

One thing that I was pleasantly surprised to learn was that the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) could easily be consumed programmatically, unlike the previous VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) which had a different backend system.

While there is not an official BCG API, which would include documentation, support and backwards compatibility, users can interact with the BCG using the same API as the BCG web interface.

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Enhancements to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) & vSphere Automated Lab Deployment Scripts

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Simplicity is something I try to strive for when creating automation, whether that is for myself or for our customers. When I develop a script, I try to keep everything within a single file, so that it is easy to share and consume. As a script increases in functionality, it may be useful to break out some of its functions, typically libraries or modules.

I was recently debugging an issue with my popular automated lab deployment script for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and while looking through the script that the user had been using, I found numerous variables that were commented out and replaced with their own values, which looked like they had different configuration and environments where they were using this single script.

It then hit me, why have I not considered externalizing all the variables that the script relied on, such that a user could easily supply different configuration options without needing to edit the primary deployment script!? 😅

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Frequently asked scenarios about Subscription & Entitlement for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+

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This is a multi-part blog series on some of the frequently asked questions and scenarios for the vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ Cloud Services. What started out as a single blog post that attempted to summarize some of the learnings and notes that I have made while answering various questions from our field and customers for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ quickly turned into a 3K+ word blog post and counting! 😅

While I thought it would be easier from a search perspective to have everything in a single blog post, I decided to take the advice from the community and actually break it up into small blogs which would be part of a large multi-part blog series, in no particular order but I recommend reading it in the following logical order as shown below:

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