Tag: vmware

VMUG Connect 2025 | Connect Four | Takeaways

The worst part about VMUG Connect 2025 is that it’s over. It was such a great event that was very unique. I say that because it felt small and personal, but the energy was booming. Its been a while since I have been at a conference and saw so many people interacting, smiling, and generally happy. So cool!

With that said, here are my ConnectFour top takeaways from VMUG Connect 2025!

Content

This was one of my reasons for attending the conference, and the VMUG team delivered. From the opening keynote to the closing panel, the content felt unique and personal. Each session I attended, I took something I could use in my professional development or in my day-to-day activities. It doesn’t always have to feel like I am drinking from a fire hose to have a session that is meaningful and useful. As I talked with other attendees, I got the impression that the feeling was mutual. Of course, there is always room for improvement, but this conference earns very high marks in my opinion.

Hock Tan

The CEO of Broadcom made an appearance at the conference for the closing keynote. The CEO of a multi-billion-dollar (50+ billion, but who’s counting) company made a special trip to St. Louis to speak to a group of 300+ VMUG members. Think about that for a minute and let it sink in. He has a great vision to ensure VMware creates the BEST private cloud for its customers, and while I do not agree with all of his decisions or things he says, I DO believe he will ensure that VMware succeeds! Before the closing keynote, I had the pleasure of having a small group conversation with him, he is a pleasant man who understands all the verticals of business. It was a great opportunity, and I cannot thank VMUG enough for that time.

Community

Look, 2024 was rough. Like really, really rough. But it’s in the past, and we ushered in 2025 with a whole different outlook! The community was very energetic last week. I could not walk around the venue without seeing groups of people talking, joking, carrying on about who knows what. It was amazing. It reminded me of a smaller version of VMworld from the early 20-teens. I was lucky enough to be invited to the Leader Summit, my first. It was a fantastic experience. I met so many new and experienced leaders. While VMware Explore offers you the opportunity to meet folks on your own, the VMUG Leader Summit forced us to interact, converse, and learn about each other. I’m generally a quiet person around new folks, but the VMUG team had us in group activities, which forced us to interact and, most importantly, learn about the other leaders. It is clear to me that Broadcom is 100% in support of the community. They showed up in force to support this conference, and not just people, they paid for any VMUG Advantage member to take a Certification exam! They want to provide the best experience for workers who need to support their products. This just proves to me the community is strong, vibrant, and has a strong future that I am excited to be a part of!

Connections

VMUG Connect increased my personal and professional connections, pun intended. I’m not exactly sure how many new LinkedIn connections and X followers I grew by, but it was more than any other event I have attended. The crazy thing is that I wanted to connect with people. People wanted to talk and connect with me. That is the type of energy this event had. Walking around the venue during the conference or the hotel bars after hours, we just found a place to talk about work, or any other topic that came to mind. It was super cool to meet so many leaders and VMUG members from around the world. Over 50 countries were represented, and I think I learned just as much about other cultures as I did about the tech they support.

Summary

The next Community event cannot happen soon enough. I look forward to talking with my fellow San Antonio leaders to get our next VMUG meeting scheduled. I cannot wait until the next VMUG Connect or UserCon! Thank you VMUG and Broadcom for such a great event!

Not the Error I expected! Connect-NsxtServer

Howdy!

It’s been quite a while since I created a blog post. Not sure I would want to say exactly how long. However, today I had a brand new VM that I was using to write some automation with PowerShell/PowerCLI. It took me a few minutes to figure this one out. Maybe it was me?

As I said I set up a brand new machine, updated .net, connected to our internal PowerShell Gallery and installed the latest version of VMware.PowerCLI ~ version 13. The automation I wanted to perform was specifically related to getting some health and status of different pieces of NSX. I ran the following command :

Connect-NsxtServer -Server nsxmgr.local -user admin -password "VMware1!"

The error is below:

Connect-NsxtServer : 13/02/2025 13:15:09 Connect-NsxtServer Unable to connect to the remote server
At line:1 char:1
+ Connect-NsxtServer -Server nsxmgr.local -User admin -Password .......

“Unable to connect to the remote server” – Now being the seasoned system administrator I am, I immediately thought to myself. “ITS DNS!” I was so proud of myself. Finally identified that DNS issue before anyone else! So I opened up a separate cmd window – because for some reason I hate to ping from PowerShell consoles.

Imagine my shock when I was able to ping and resolve the name of the NSX server with no issue. I was so disappointed, disappointed it wasn’t working, disappointed it wasn’t DNS. So I went back to my primary development machine – had no issues connecting to the NSX server. I probably spent more time than I needed troubleshooting the network of this new virtual machine. I checked the MAC address, made sure I could ping the gateway. The error made no sense to me.

Next logical step for me was to connect to a vCenter – that always works.

Connect-VIServer 192.168.0.10 -user administrator -password "VMware1!"

Boom! Oh wait…. An error? What is wrong with me today?

Connect-VIServer : 13/02/2020 13:21:46  Connect-VIServer                Error: Invalid server certificate. Use Set-PowerCLIConfiguration to set the value for the InvalidCertificateAction option to Prompt if you'd like to connect once or to add a permanent exception for this server.
Additional Information: Could not establish secure channel for SSL/TLS with authority .....

This is an error I have seen many times before. For some reason I did not think to set the PowerCLI configuration on this new machine, knowing I was only going to be connecting to NSX. I ran the following command:

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore -ParticipateInCeip $false

Now I was able to run the command to connect to the NSX server.

Connect-NsxtServer -Server nsxmgr.local -user admin -password "VMware1!"

I was back in business and quickly completed the deployment of my scripts to check on those health and well being of our NSX items.

The reason this caught me off guard was that with the same “Verb” and essentially the same module – I got different errors for the same underlying issue.

Hopefully someone reads this and finds it useful. It is not by any means a new issue. Just a fun little problem I ran across taking things for granted.