For most of my career, “ESXi security” meant strong passwords and not exposing the management interface to the internet. That’s no longer enough. Over the last year, ransomware crews stopped breaking into guests one at a time and started going straight for the hypervisor — because owning one host means owning every VM on it. … Read more
I’ve spent the last two posts hardening and isolating VMware. Hyper-V deserves the same treatment — and if you’re running a multi-hypervisor strategy like I am, you can’t harden one platform and wave the other through. The good news: nearly every ESXi control has a Hyper-V equivalent, the threat model is identical, and in a … Read more
Every team I talk to is calling the move from VCF 5.x to VCF 9 an “upgrade.” It isn’t. Calling it that sets the wrong expectations and gets people in trouble. VCF 9 is an architecture change wearing an upgrade’s clothing — and the sooner you treat it that way, the better your plan will … Read more
If you’ve spent your career in VMware land, Hyper-V on Server Core can feel alien at first. No GUI. No vCenter. Just a blinking command prompt and PowerShell. But once you get past the initial discomfort, you’ll find that Server Core is exactly how a hypervisor should run — lean, minimal attack surface, and nothing … Read more
What it actually takes to design a cloud platform for a major financial institution — the architecture decisions, the trade-offs, and the automation that holds it together.
Having led this migration at enterprise scale, here’s the real playbook — including the gotchas that aren’t in VMware’s documentation.
Everyone’s talking about VMware alternatives after the Broadcom acquisition. But Hyper-V has quietly become a very solid option for certain workloads.
vCenter’s built-in alerting is fine until it isn’t. Here’s how I replaced it with a lightweight stack that actually tells me what matters.
I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. From my first sysadmin role at a school in New Jersey, through email server migrations at manufacturing firms, building data centers for industrial companies, deploying virtualized environments at professional services organizations, and eventually designing cloud platforms at scale for large enterprises. In all that time, the most … Read more
Production incidents in virtualized environments have a different character than physical infrastructure failures. The failure radius can be much larger (one host failure impacts many VMs), the failure modes are sometimes subtle, and the time pressure to recover can lead to decisions that compound the original problem. These are some of the patterns I’ve seen, … Read more