Welcome to INITBT | Can Karahaliloglu, Senior IT Infrastructure Engineer

3 May 20269 May 2026 Can KarahaliloğluLeave a comment

I have been working in IT infrastructure for 16 years. Not in meetings. Not in slide decks. In datacenters, racking servers, pulling cables, troubleshooting at 2am, and figuring out why something that worked yesterday suddenly does not work today.

Over the years I have worked across some of the most demanding environments you can find: semiconductor manufacturing, global banking, space agency operations, and large-scale cloud platforms. The one thing they all had in common: when something breaks, it costs real money, and someone needs to fix it fast.

This blog exists because this industry never stops moving, and not always in the right direction.

ESXi 7.x to 8.0 Upgrade – Identifying SHA1 Certificates with Confidence When KB313460 and KB399843 Fall Short

12 May 2026 Can KarahaliloğluLeave a comment

You are upgrading vCenter and ESXi from 7.x to 8.0 U3. The precheck fails on the ESXi side with a weak certificate signature error. SHA1 certificates somewhere on the hosts. Broadcom has KBs for this. KB 313460 and KB 399843. You follow them. You run the commands. The cert is still there. Or you cannot tell which one to remove.

This post is about why the standard commands fall short, and the openssl method that closes the gap. Tested in a real production environment during an ESXi 7.x to 8.0 U3 upgrade. Not a lab.

The Error

The detection script from KB 313460, called vsphere8_upgrade_certificate_checks.py, returns errors like this on ESXi hosts:

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1: A Field Engineer’s Read

9 May 20269 May 2026 Can KarahaliloğluLeave a comment

Broadcom released VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 on May 5, 2026. The official messaging is all about AI. Ignore that for now. Here is what actually changed and what it means if you run these environments for a living.

First — What Is VCF?

VCF bundles vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and lifecycle management into one platform. You manage compute, storage, and networking together. One upgrade process. One support call. One control plane.

If you run standalone vSphere today, VCF is the same infrastructure — with automation and operational structure on top. It is not a replacement for your skills. It is a framework for running them at scale.

What Changed in 9.1 — Feature by Feature

Scale: 5,000 Hosts Per Instance

Migrating Veeam B&R from SQL Server to PostgreSQL and Upgrading from Windows Server 2012R2 to Windows Server 2019

9 May 20269 May 2026 Can KarahaliloğluLeave a comment

If you’re running Veeam Backup & Replication on an aging Windows Server 2012 R2 host, chances are it was originally configured with a SQL Server Express backend — the default for older Veeam installations. With Veeam V12 standardizing on PostgreSQL and Windows Server 2012 R2 reaching end of life, the time to modernize is now.

This guide covers a complete, production-tested migration path: assessing your current environment, migrating the Veeam configuration database from SQL Server 2012 to PostgreSQL 15, and performing an in-place OS upgrade to Windows Server 2019 — all without rebuilding the server from scratch.