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Edouard Topin's Blog

Topic: broadcom

All articles tagged “broadcom”.

18 articles

2026

  1. 14 min read

    vDefend Distributed Firewall: zero trust at the workload level

    Least-privilege policy per vNIC, built on dynamic groups and tags rather than IP addresses — and the honest boundary where federated identity stops and the firewall starts.

  2. 16 min read

    VCF Identity Broker: where VCF 9.1 single sign-on actually stops

    VCF Identity Broker federates login across the VCF consoles, but the documented perimeter is narrower than the pitch. We map what it covers, what stays local, and the break-glass path.

  3. 16 min read

    Federating VCF identity: Okta, Entra ID, and the generic path

    Four identity providers are documented by name, each with its own protocol path. Everything else goes through generic SAML 2.0 — a route that works without being a support statement.

  4. 6 min read

    Capacity planning: ESA vs OSA, what really changes

    Switching from OSA to ESA changes how you size a vSAN cluster. We compare the two models side by side: usable capacity, headroom, and the new rules.

  5. 6 min read

    NVMe memory tiering: 2x VM density, and what it costs

    At the recommended 1:1 ratio, Broadcom reports 2x VM density with a 5–10% HammerDB performance loss; this guide defines the eligibility conditions.

  6. 6 min read

    RAID-5/6 on vSAN ESA: what replaces the write penalty

    ESA replaces read-modify-write with a durable log and aligned full-stripe writes, while vSAN 9.1 still documents a possible RAID-1 advantage.

  7. 7 min read

    VCF LCM: end-to-end workflows and failure recovery

    When a VCF 9.1 lifecycle batch fails, read real state before retrying. Map fleet, instance and domain recovery, prechecks and resource locks.

  8. 7 min read

    vSAN upgrades without downtime: ESA rolling patterns

    Roll ESX upgrades through vSAN ESA one host at a time: choose an evacuation mode, control resync, and stop safely when capacity or policy blocks progress.

  9. 6 min read

    ESXi live patching: kernel updates without reboot

    ESXi live patching lets you ship CVE fixes without evacuating hosts. We dig into how it works, what it does NOT cover, and where it changes your patch SLA.

  10. 11 min read

    RAG in production: from POC to scale on VCF

    Most RAG POCs die between demo and production. We walk through the gap — chunking, freshness, evals, observability — on VCF and VKS.

  11. 12 min read

    Vector databases on VKS: pgvector, Milvus, Weaviate

    RAG needs a vector store. We compare pgvector, Milvus and Weaviate on VKS — index quality, ops surface, and which one actually fits your team.

  12. 11 min read

    GPU pooling on VCF: NVIDIA vGPU + MIG in practice

    Sharing GPUs across tenants is the only way private AI math works. We walk through vGPU profiles, MIG slicing, and the pitfalls of mixed-workload scheduling.

  13. 11 min read

    Private AI on VCF: the architecture that fits in your DC

    VCF Private AI Foundation is the stack Broadcom proposes for hosting LLMs and inference in your own DC. We dissect it, layer by layer, seams visible.

  14. 8 min read

    VCF 9.1: security & resilience — live patching and anti-ransomware

    Live Patching for ESX with no maintenance window, continuous compliance, and on-prem anti-ransomware recovery. What changes for your recovery plan.

  15. 7 min read

    VCF 9.1: Kubernetes & self-service, the platform takes over

    VKS linked clones, 500 clusters per Supervisor, simplified Container-as-a-Service and Tech Preview object storage: how VCF 9.1 closes the self-service gap.

  16. 9 min read

    VCF 9.1 — Networking & scale: EVPN, VPC L4 and observability

    EVPN-VXLAN with the physical fabric, L4 Load Balancer and IPSec VPN on VPC, SDDC Manager sync, bare-metal edge import, multi-NIC VKS and network observability.

  17. 9 min read

    VCF 9.1: the infrastructure efficiency that justifies -40% TCO

    NVMe memory tiering, global vSAN dedup, vSphere ZTP, 5000-host scale: what actually changes in VCF 9.1 on the infrastructure cost side, decoded for architects.

  18. 5 min read

    The new VCF 9 architecture explained to architects

    VCF 9 is not a minor upgrade: it's a complete overhaul of the operational model. What a cloud architect must understand before any adoption project.