Quick Tip - Inventory core count for vSphere+, vSAN+ & VCF+ Cloud Service

vSphere+ and vSAN+ was launched last year as a new cloud service and the unit of consumption are CPU cores, which needs to be determined prior to purchasing a subscription for either cloud services. To help customers inventory their existing vSphere and vSAN CPU core usage, especially useful for general visibility and planning purposes, I had developed a simple PowerCLI function that was published last year as a VMware KB article (89116).

In recent weeks, I had noticed an increased number of inquiries from our field and customers on how to assess their existing vSphere and vSAN environment for transition to vSphere+ and vSAN+ and I realized that many folks may not have been aware of the scripts and the KB article that was available.

Once you have downloaded the PowerCLI script, imported the function and connect to an existing vCenter Server environment, you can then use the Get-vSpherePlusCPUSocketToCoreUsage function which will automatically retrieve all ESXi hosts within your vCenter Server and display the current CPU core usage, vSphere+ Cores and vSAN+ Cores required as shown in the example screenshot below.

In addition, you can also inventory specific vSphere Clusters by using the -ClusterName parameter and output can also be stored in a CSV file by using the -Csv parameter.

For customers interested in inventorying their existing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment to help plan for their transition to the new VCF+ Cloud Service which was also launched last year, an enhancement has been added to the open source PowerVCF reporting module, which will provide the required CPU cores for use with VCF+ as shown in example screenshot below.

Note: While the PowerVCF reporting module has already merged the enhancement, it has not been published as an official release and you will need to manually download the module if you wish to use this feature right now. If you  can wait, a new release should go out later this month and will also appear in Microsoft PowerShell Gallery.