This is a multi-part blog series on some of the frequently asked questions and scenarios for the vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ Cloud Services. What started out as a single blog post that attempted to summarize some of the learnings and notes that I have made while answering various questions from our field and customers for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ quickly turned into a 3K+ word blog post and counting! 😅
While I thought it would be easier from a search perspective to have everything in a single blog post, I decided to take the advice from the community and actually break it up into small blogs which would be part of a large multi-part blog series, in no particular order but I recommend reading it in the following logical order as shown below:
- Frequently asked scenarios about vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about vCenter Lifecycle Management for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about vCenter Desired State Configuration for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ (THIS BLOG POST)
- Frequently asked scenarios about VM Provisioning & Management for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about Global Inventory for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
- Frequently asked scenarios about Subscription & Entitlement for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+
Desired State Configuration
Another powerful capability that is available with vSphere+ is the Desired State Configuration (DSC) for managing configurations across multiple vCenter Server(s). Once a vCenter Server has been registered, you will be able to create a vCenter Desired State Profile (DSP) from your existing vCenter Server or you can even import one that you may have downloaded.
You can assign a single DSP to multiple vCenter Server(s) or you can create and assign a unique DSP for each vCenter Server. Once a DSP has been assigned to a vCenter Server, you can check its configuration compliance by either running the compliance check manually or scheduling a compliance check to run on a particular frequency and notifying user(s) via email when a configuration drift has been detected.
As of right now, the vCenter DSC capability only provides information about the configuration drift and provides a nice visual side-by-side view of the changes shown in the screenshot above. Automatic remediation with vCenter DSC is still being worked on and for now, users will need to manually remediate or leverage vSphere Automation to resolve any configuration drifts that has been identified.
For those interested in the 15day free vSphere+ trial, the vCenter DSC capability is available during the trial period.
Here are some additional resources related to vCenter Desired State Configuration that might be of interests:
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