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vCenter Converter 6.4 Beta is now LIVE

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To add to the exciting release week for VMware, I am happy to share that the vCenter Converter team has just released a public beta for their next upcoming 6.4 release!

If you are an existing vCenter Converter beta participant, you can head over to the vCenter Converter Beta Community https://communities.vmware.com/t5/vCenter-Converter/ct-p/5385 to download the latest release. If you wish to join the Beta program, simply register for free at https://www.vmware.com/learn/1645300_REG.html

UPDATE (05/11/23) - vCenter Converter 6.4 has officially GA'ed and can now be downloaded from HERE.

There are lots of exciting new updates with vCenter Converter 6.4 such as support for vSphere 8 and another highly requested feature is ability to convert from an Amazon EC2 instance to a vSphere-based VM! For more details, please refer to release notes which can be found HERE.

  • Added support for NVMe disk controllers
  • Added support for paravirtual SCSI disk controllers
  • Added support for virtual machine compatibility up to hardware version 20
  • Added support for VMware vCenter version 8.0 and VMware ESXi version 8.0
  • Аdded support for VMware Workstation version 17 and VMware Fusion version 13
  • Added conversion support for Amazon EC2 instances (from AWS EC2 to VMware vSphere or VMware Cloud on AWS)
  • Added conversion support for UEFI secure boot
  • Added conversion support for Microsoft VBS
  • Improved the overall security of vCenter Converter

Auditing vSphere Datastore activities (Download, Upload, Copy, Move, Rename and Delete)

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What feels like a weekly response, vCenter Server Events, should always be your initial starting point in helping you understand the Who, What and When for something occurring within your vSphere environment. There are over 2K+ events that are published out of the box from vCenter Server with hundreds more from 2nd and 3rd party solutions that integrate with vCenter Server.

Combine vCenter Server Events with the power of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA), you now have a powerful Event-Driven Automation solution that can solve literally a limitless number of use cases, many of which have been shared by existing users found in this document HERE.

Today, I had received a question about auditing customers vSphere Datastore activities and identifying when someone has manually downloaded a Virtual Machine Virtual Disk (VMDK)?

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Generating a vSphere UI link to a specific Virtual Machine

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For some organizations, after a VM has been provisioned, it is customary to send a notification (email, slack, etc) to their end users with login credentials including the URL for the vSphere UI.

Typically, the provided URL is just the vCenter Server base URL and end users would then have to login and navigate to their specific VM(s) within the vSphere Inventory. A question was brought up on whether a better end user experience could be provided to their internal users? They were interested in providing their end users with a specific URL link that would take them directly to their VM, which they can also bookmark for future uses.

Furthermore, the customer was also interested in generating the URL programmatically, so that it can be incorporated into their existing provisioning workflows.

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