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Power off VM from Guest OS Reboot capability in vSphere 8

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In 2019, a new VM advanced setting called vmx.reboot.PowerCycle was introduced and greatly simplified the remediation of CPU vulnerabilities for our customers. The operational challenge that came with applying CPU microcode updates was that all running VMs on an ESXi host would need to go through a complete power cycle (power off and power back on) before the guest operating system(s) would be fully protected.

The new VM setting would notify ESXi to convert a guest operating system reboot into a VM power cycle operation, which aligns nicely when an organization applies a guest OS update or patch and the guest OS is then rebooted afterwards. The benefit to our customers is that the remediation of CPU vulnerabilities can co-exists with an organizations existing maintenance window and the OS is remediated through a regular guest OS reboot. From the guest OS point of view, nothing has changed, it still sees a reboot but from the VM virtual hardware point of view, a complete power cycle has occurred. A very cool and innovative solution if you ask me!?

The reason for this background, there is another use case that has also been operationally challenging which is upgrading the VM Compatibility, also known as VM Virtual Hardware. A VM must be powered off before you can change the VM Compatibility and a simliar challenge arises with coordinating the downtime of a VM with application owners/teams. What if we had a simliar capability like the guest OS reboot triggering a power cycle, but instead of power cycling the VM, it would simply power it off?

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Infinite possibilities with new VM Service CloudInit transport for vSphere with Tanzu in vSphere 8

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When the VM Service capability (part of Sphere with Tanzu) was first introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, I was really excited for the possibilities this feature could unlock for both DevOps personas but also for our VI Admins. Currently, the VM Service can only deploy two specific OVF images (CentOS and Ubuntu) that are pre-built by VMware and distributed from the VMware marketplace.

While the potential for the VM Service is definitely there, our customers and even our partners need the ability to create their own custom images and using approved operating systems that they have built and harden based on the needs of their organizations. Even though I was able to get the VM Service to deploy a non-default image like a Nested ESXi VM using a couple of tricks, there needs to be a much easier and supported way to create and deploy non-default VMware OS images and this is where vSphere 8 can now help 😀

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vSphere Datasets - New Virtual Machine Metadata Service in vSphere 8

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Since the early days of Virtual Center and ESX, the only method for creating and sharing arbitrary metadata between the vSphere Management layer and the guest operating system was to use either guest variables (guestinfo) or the OVF runtime environment.

While both of these capabilities have enabled a ton of interesting use cases and have even inspired creative solutions such as this, this, this, this and this to just name a few, it certainly has its challenges and nuances from an end user experience perspective.

For example, the persistency or the non-persistency of guest variables solely depended on when it was applied to a Virtual Machine and the power state it was in, which can be very frustrating to discover for the first time and the inconsistent behavior for end users. The lack of security and access control in both guest variables and the OVF runtime environment also means the metadata could easily be overwritten or removed by users in either the vSphere Management layer or guest operating system, making this challenging to scale for larger organizations.

This is why I am excited for vSphere 8 and the new vSphere Dataset feature!

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