Adrian Heißler

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Create an Aria Automation Deployment using the API

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On May 9, 2025

In VMware

In this lab, I’ll show you how to request a deployment from a catalog item. This catalog item has a custom form with an Aria Orchestrator action to dynamically populate drop down menu values based on a value provided by another drop down value.

To do so, you make a POST request with a project ID that has a cloud template version released to the project. The request body includes the ID of the catalog item from which you are requesting the deployment, and the version of the released cloud template.

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Broadcom changes download URLs for VMware products

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On April 25, 2025

In VMware

On April 23 2025, Broadcom deactivated the previous URLs to their public repositories from which the binaries for VCF, vCenter, ESX, and vSAN File Services can be downloaded. The new URLs now must contain customer-specific code. This particularly affects the automatic download of patches.

Broadcom announced two fundamental changes to the way VMware updates are available. First, they will now only be available at dl.broadcom.com, instead of depot.vmware.com, hostupdate.vmware.com, or vapp-updates.vmware.com as before.

Administrators must therefore ensure that the vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) or VMware Update Manager (VUM), for example, have access to the new address at broadcom.com and, if necessary, enable it in the firewall. Conversely, the previous URLs no longer have any function and can be blocked.

Second, each customer will receive a unique URL in the future – downloading from the public repositories via a general address will no longer be possible. Companies will receive the corresponding token from the Broadcom support portal.

The new URLs then follow this pattern: 

https://dl.broadcom.com/<Your_Download_Token>/PROD/COMP/ESX_HOST/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

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VMware home lab 2025 update

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On January 28, 2025

In VMware

Having a VMware home lab is important to learn products like VMware Cloud Foundation. In earlier posts I’ve already provided a comprehensive description of how to setup such a lab.

In this article, I’m going to have a fresh look on my lab, especially on the foundation of it — the hardware BOM.

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Access to “personal” VCF licenses changes

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On December 15, 2024

In VMware

As already discussed during the last weeks (see also here), access to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licenses is changing in 2025. There are two ways to get personal VCF licenses, first being either a vExpert, or second having a VMUG Advantage membership. Both involve an active VMUG Advantage membership, and the requirement of passing the VCP-VCF certification exam, but vExperts get the VMUG Advantage membership for free (most likely only in 2025).

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VMware Cloud Foundation Lab installation with Holodeck

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On November 21, 2024

In VMware

As I have now a new shiny lab server, I wanted to have a possibility to easily deploy and destroy a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment for learning and presentation purposes.

Deploying a full VCF stack is a lengthy process where a lot of components must be considered and need to fit together, e.g. the many VCF systems themselves, as well surrounding systems like Active Directory, or upstream routers. To make the deployment easily repeatable, the whole deployment process must be automated. Luckily, smart people at VMware have exactly done this and created the Holodeck Toolkit for this use case. Holodeck enables us to deploy a nested VCF environment on a single ESXi host in an automated fashion.

In this blog post, I’ll describe my experience deploying a single VCF 5.1.1 instance using the Holodeck Toolkit 2.0. Although the official Holodeck documentation is quite extensive, I did run into some issues during my initial deployments, which I’m going to describe here as well.

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