WilliamLam.com

Identifying vSphere with Tanzu Managed VMs

by // Leave a Comment

With an increasing number of customers enabling the vSphere with Tanzu capability, which is included in both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), more and more Virtual Machines will be deployed using the more modern approach of declarative provisioning using the powerful VM Service feature.


When using the vSphere UI, you can easily distinguish between a vSphere with Tanzu managed VM from a traditional VM by checking whether it is provisioned within a vSphere Namespace or whether it contains the "Developer Managed" label as shown in the screenshot above.

However, how do you identify a vSphere with Tanzu managed VM when using the vSphere API for Automation purposes?

[Read more...]

Minimum vSphere privileges to install or remove patch from ESXi

by // Leave a Comment

I recently got a question from our field inquiring about the minimum vSphere privileges that would be required to either install or remove a patch (VIB/Component) from an ESXi host. The customer was interested in using PowerCLI and specifically the ESXLI interface to automate the installation and removal of a VIB and wanted to create a custom vSphere Role with the minimum privileges, which can be done with vCenter Server or even a standalone ESXi host (properly licensed).

Since I was familiar with the underlying ESXi patch API that is used for these operations, a nice benefit of the vSphere API Reference is that it also lists the specific vSphere Privileges that is required for a given operation and in this case, it is just Host.Config.Patch privilege.

However, when the customer attempted to create a custom vSphere Role with just this privilege and perform the installation operation, they still received an error as shown in the screenshot below, which was a bit cryptic but they had assumed it was still permissions related as full administrative account had worked:

OperationStopped: Response status code does not indicate success: 500 (Internal Server Error)


[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Character Limits for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Objects

by // Leave a Comment

Similar to my blog post on character limits for the different types of vSphere Inventory Objects, here is a quick look on some VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Objects and their respective character limits.

While looking into this topic, I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of the rename workflows in SDDC Manager UI includes an informational icon that provides the naming constraints in addition to the character limit. I was able to test and verify the character limits by using a combination of the SDDC Manager UI and API and below were my findings as of the VCF 5.1 release.

Object Character Limit Minimum Character Limit Maximum
Management Domain 3 20
Workload Domain 3 20
Network Pool 3 40
Organization Name 3 20
Edge Cluster 1 80