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First look at Project Keswick

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VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO) was announced at VMware Explore US last week and one of the components that it is built on is using something called Project Keswick.

In fact, at VMware Explore, Project Keswick was officially launched and is now available for customers to try out! I was fortunate enough to attend the Project Keswick technical deep dive session in person, but if you were not able to make the session or you were not at VMware Explore, the session recording is already available online for free to watch #VIB2169LV Scaling and Deploying ESXi at the Edge with Desired State Management and GitOps.

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How to check the number of days before ESXi password expires?

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Local user accounts created in ESXi including the root user has a default password expiration of 99999 days before administrators need to change the password. Users can control the password expiry by modifying the following ESXi Advanced Setting called Security.PasswordMaxDays which is also referenced in the ESXi Security Documentation along with other advanced configurations.

Password rotation or updates are typically managed by an organizations password management solution which is responsible keeping track and notifying when local passwords are about to expire. With that said, not everyone has a password management solution and how do you quickly check how many days left before an account password expires on an ESXi host? I initially thought this should be pretty simple to figure out, especially with utilities like chage but the version that ESXi ships is a stripped down version via Busybox and it did not provide any expiry details like the typical chage version might.

This meant, that the password expiry would need to be calculated manually and luckily, this is not a new concept. The answer lies in the /etc/shadow file which contains a number of fields that can then be used to figure out the number of days left before an account expires or if has already expired. I will not bore you with the details, but you can create the following shell script which can run in the ESXi Shell to provide you with the answer.

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How to relocate an existing vSphere Content Library from one vSphere Datastore to another?

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When you create a vSphere Content Library using vCenter Server, the content library is comprised of both the raw uploaded files (OVF, OVA, VM Templates, ISO, etc) which are stored in a vSphere Datastore and the metadata that is generated by vCenter Server for the individual files, which are stored in the vCenter Server Database (VCDB). In contrast, when an External vSphere Content Library is created, which can be backed by any HTTP(s) endpoint, both the metadata along with the raw files are stored external to the vCenter Server and is managed separately.

Today, there is not an easy way to relocate or move an existing vSphere Content Library from one vSphere Datastore to another. The process would require creating a new vSphere Content Library, then manually using either the vSphere UI or API to then copy all the files from the previous content library to the newly created one which is backed by a different vSphere Datastore.

Typically, the reason for this use case is either you are running out of storage and can not expand further or you need to decomission the underlying storage backing the content library.

Recently, I needed to look into this for my own homelab setup where I plan to rebuild one of my setup which is running on vSAN and I wanted to preserve existing content library without having to transfer content back/fourth. The context above was important as I was able to figure out this could be done with some minor tweaks to the VCDB (which I typically do not recommend touching for this reason) but for this purpose, it really is the only way which I had also confirmed with Engineering.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk.

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