On LinkedIn I just posted this:
On your way to update your VCF/vSphere environment (perhaps to VCF 9.1?) but tired of manually checking each component in your vCenter again the Broadcom compatibility guide? This is a situation I often hear from my customers and I can totally relate to this.
Before You Upgrade, Someone Has to Check the Hardware
Every vSphere or VCF upgrade comes with the same prerequisite: verify that your host hardware — CPUs, NICs, HBAs, SSDs — is certified for the target release. The Broadcom Compatibility Guide is the source of truth, but going through it manually for a infrastructure of any meaningful size takes time and is easy to get wrong.
esx-hcl-check (on GitHub) is a single CLI binary that does exactly what it says: it connects to your vCenter, pulls the full hardware straight from the vSphere inventory — CPUs, I/O controllers, NICs, HBAs, vSAN SSDs — and cross-references every component against the Broadcom Compatibility Guide API and the vSAN offline HCL database.
./esx-hcl-check -release="ESXi 9.1" -unique -unsupported
The result is a filtered list of only the hardware that will not support your next release.
It also covers the less obvious cases: certified hardware running an unsupported firmware or driver version (-mismatch), vSAN SSDs and NVMe drives (-vsan), and JSON output for anyone who wants to feed the results into a report (-json).
Use of AI
And here is thing that fundamentally changed my perspective on how to use AI. Sure, you can keep using it as a better google search engine.
But how about removing the need to learn upfront a few months of a programming language and spending days on StackOverflow to fix type errors.
“Vibe Coding” is a term that was coined for this approach where AI is your coding assistant. It seems distant for me, as coding is not my day job. But now, I can assist my day job with a coding “team”.
For now, I leave you with a link to the project and might add more thoughts as we go:
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