For most users, you probably have a large collection of vSphere license keys that have been provisioned over the years and keeping track of the product SKU, entitled features and capacity can be a challenge, especially if you are just looking at the raw 25 character license string.
While the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) is recommended for all license management operations(view, split, merge, etc), did you know you could also use vCenter Server to help decode a particular license key?
Since vSphere 7.0, it has been much simpler to correlate between an NSX network segment defined in NSX Manager and its representation as a vSphere Distributed Virtual Portgroup (DVG) in vCenter Server as demonstrated in screenshot below using the vSphere UI.
With the additional NSX information such as NSX Transport Zone ID, Transport Zone ID Name, Logical Switch ID, Segment Name and VNI (Virtual Network Identifier), users can streamline debugging and troubleshooting issues with their network team by quickly providing this relevant information.
I recently had a user ask about retrieving the VNI information for a given NSX segment in vCenter Server using PowerCLI, so here is a quick snippet including other NSX information for those interested.
Have you ever worked on something before and several years later, you have totally forgotten about it!? That is exactly the story behind this recent question on finding the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version by using vCenter Server.
Obviously, the most logical place to look for the version of VCF is by using SDDC Manager which can be found within the VCF Workload Domain UI as shown in the screenshot below:
You can also get the VCF version by using the VCF API which can easily be retrieved with PowerVCF (PowerShell Module for VCF) using the Get-VCFManager function.
It was only after answering the question did I realized that you CAN also retrieve the VCF version by using vCenter Server and not only that, this method of retrieval was a solution that I had proposed and was implemented back in 2017!