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Automating deployment of vSAN Data Protection OVA with PowerCLI

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vSphere 8.0 Update 3 introduces a new vSAN Data Protection capability for the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) and it is currently delivered as a standalone VMware OVA (see Duncan's post in case you are wondering where to download) which, once deployed and configures, enables a new vSphere UI plugin as shown in screenshot below.


After going through the manual (vSphere UI) deployment workflow, which also included some non-traditional input like requiring the raw vCenter Server TLS certificate, I was interested in automating the deployment using PowerCLI.

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VM snapshot retention-based removal in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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VM snapshots are an extremely useful feature in vSphere but they can also be miss-used and retained for much longer than they should, sometimes weeks, months and even years! Sadly, having a forgotten VM snapshot for a year or longer is not actually as rare as you might expect and I have definitely heard some interesting stories from our field and customers.

While cleaning up a recent VM snapshot, I noticed a new option in the delete all snapshot workflow that now allow users to specify the age of the snapshot to remove which is a new feature in the latest release of vSphere 8.0 Update 3.


This makes it easy for administrators to quickly delete old snapshots without having to write any automation, which is typically how most users manage snapshot retention period including an event-driven approach using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution.

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Retrieving CPU Microcode revision from ESXi in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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Whether you are applying a CPU microcode update through a hardware vendor's BIOS update or an ESXi update/upgrade, verifying the CPU microcode revision within ESXi is not as easy as it could be.

Today, if you wanted to get the current CPU microcode revision from ESXi, you would need to enable SSH and then use the vsish interface to retrieve this information by running the following command:

vsish -e cat /hardware/cpu/cpuList/0 | grep "microcode" -A2

While you can retrieve the CPU microcode revision, the method and required interfaces was less than ideal, especially at scale. Given ESXi already exposes a number CPU attributes via the ESXCLI interface, which includes programmatic access when using PowerCLI, I thought it would be a nice feature to also include the CPU microcode revision as part of the output and had filed an internal feature enhancement a few years back.

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