A conversation with Chris DeFortuna, Cloud and Infrastructure Manager at Meriplex When Broadcom’s restructuring of the VCSP program cut Meriplex’s route to market, Chris DeFortuna and his team didn’t just lose a vendor relationship. They lost the foundation of a managed cloud business that had been running on VMware for nearly two decades, serving thousands […]
· July 9, 2026 · 6 min read
In the previous post, I introduced the mental model for CI/CD against Private Cloud Director (PCD): a provisioning phase driven by Terraform, a configuration phase driven by Ansible, and a handoff between them through dynamic inventory. In this post, I’d like to zoom in on the provisioning phase and walk through what a GitOps pipeline
· May 19, 2026 · 14 min read
Today’s CIOs and CTOs are stuck between two real pressures. Development teams need infrastructure now. Compliance teams need control that holds up under audit. When either side wins completely, the organization loses. If it takes two weeks to get a VM through a request queue, teams don’t wait. They open a public cloud account. They
· May 8, 2026 · 4 min read
In earlier posts in the Automating Private Cloud Director series, I covered the Private Cloud Director (PCD) API, Terraform, Ansible, and enterprise integration patterns. Those posts focused on the primitives: the interfaces and tools you use to drive PCD programmatically. In this post, I’d like to shift from primitives to patterns, and specifically to the
· May 6, 2026 · 6 min read
This is the fourth post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. The previous posts covered the foundational toolchain: API authentication, Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, and Ansible for infrastructure & post-deployment configuration. Those capabilities are sufficient for many organizations. But in enterprises with compliance requirements, regulated workloads, or large IT teams, “anyone can deploy from
· April 29, 2026 · 8 min read
Providing private cloud resources across multiple teams is a standard deployment model in the modern data center. Whether you’re splitting infrastructure between Finance and Engineering, giving unique customers their own isolated infrastructure, or managing dev, staging, and production as distinct environments, multi-tenancy is table stakes in a virtualized environment. Deploying and managing isolated environments is
· April 27, 2026 · 9 min read
This is the third post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. In the first post, I covered the API surface and authentication. In the second, I walked through deploying a VM with Terraform. In this post, I’d like to cover Ansible. Where Terraform excels at declaring infrastructure state (“I want this VM, this volume,
· April 20, 2026 · 8 min read
This is the second post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. In the first post, I covered the Private Cloud Director (PCD) API surface, how authentication works under the hood, and using the CLI. In this post, I’d like to walk through something practical: installing Terraform, pointing it at your PCD environment, and deploying
· April 15, 2026 · 8 min read
If you’re an MSP right now, you’re probably managing at least two uncomfortable conversations simultaneously. The first is about your virtualization platform—costs are up, licensing has changed, and everyone wants to know what your VMware story looks like going forward. The second is about AI: customers are asking about it, vendors are pitching it, and
· April 13, 2026 · 9 min read
This is the first post in the Automating Private Cloud Director series. Everything you can do in the Private Cloud Director (PCD) UI, you can do through an API. Creating VMs, managing networks, configuring storage, assigning users to tenants. All of it. That’s not an afterthought; the UI itself is an API client. In this
· April 6, 2026 · 7 min read
If you’re evaluating a VMware alternative, monitoring is one of the first topics that comes up. It’s a capability that quietly blocks a migration if it’s missing. Your team already has dashboards, alerting rules, and capacity planning workflows built around vCenter and vROps. The question isn’t whether Private Cloud Director (PCD) has monitoring. It’s whether
· April 2, 2026 · 6 min read
A guide for MSPs navigating the VMware conversation with confidence Something shifted in the VMware world when Broadcom completed its acquisition. Licensing costs spiked, support models changed, and customers who had never given a second thought to their virtualization stack were suddenly calling their MSPs asking what it all means. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your
· March 31, 2026 · 9 min read