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Quick Tip - Convert VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Deployment Workbook XLSX to JSON

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The deployment wizard for VMware Cloud Builder (CB) can accept either an XLSX or JSON configuration file that describes your desired VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment.


Interestingly enough, only an XLSX template is available for users to download, edit and then provide that back as user input. While I can appreciate the rich logic that has been built into the CB workbook, I personally would prefer to work with something a bit more straight forward like JSON, especially for the ability to easily source control via Git/etc.

I have been spending some time with VCF 4.5 and CB this week and I have always wondered if there was a way to convert to JSON format given an XLSX as the initial input. While poking around the logs, I noticed a reference to the following script /opt/vmware/bringup/scripts/json-generator.sh which is used by CB to convert an XLSX to JSON document.

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Create Windows 11 Virtual Appliance using Tiny 11 with only 2GB memory

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I recently came to learn about a really cool project called Tiny 11 which is a stripped down version of Windows 11 Pro 22H2 that can run with just 2GB of memory and 8GB of storage. While you would probably not use this for production workloads, it could be interesting for those with homelabs and can even for demo purposes.

Disclaimer: Tiny 11 is not an official project from Microsoft, use at your own risk. If you are interested in creating an optimized Windows 10 or 11 image, you can also check out these VMware resources here and here to produce a similiar size image using official Microsoft tools and images.

UPDATE (02/16/23) - There is now an Arm version for Tiny 11, which is great for anyone using the ESXi-Arm Fling and the technique in this blog post would also apply.

After performing a manual installation of Tiny 11, I thought it would be neat if I could build a Virtual Appliance (OVA) for Tiny 11 and also add custom OVF properties, which would allow anyone to customize the OS further without having to rely on any external tooling.

In fact, I had demonstrated this concept back in 2019 using Windows Server 2016 in this blog post and I figure it should be easy enough to also do the same for Tiny 11 or even standard Windows 11! With a bit of trial/error, I was indeed able to create a simple Tiny 11 OVA that includes the following OVF properties as shown in the screenshot below.


My initial goal was to fully automate the building of a Tiny 11 OVA with custom OVF properties using Packer. However, after many attempts, I was not able to figure out the correct autoattended.xml configuration and decided on a semi-manual approach which is detailed in the instructions below. If anyone is able to figure out how to get Tiny 11 installed via Packer, then I may revisit this topic and automate the remainder of the setup.

Note: The instructions below are not specific to Tiny 11 in any way and is also applicable to standard Windows 10 or 11 image.

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How to check if your vCenter Server is using vSphere+ / vSAN+ Subscription?

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Once a vCenter Server has been converted to a vSphere+ and/or vSAN+ subscription, entitlements and usage for both vCenter Server and their respective ESXi hosts is all managed through the use of VMware Cloud Console as shared in this recent blog post.

If you are logged into your vCenter Server, how do you check whether it is using a vSphere+ / vSAN+ subscription or not?


Using the vSphere UI, you will see a new Subscription entry on the left hand side when selecting the vCenter Server inventory under Configure->Settings->Subscription which will indicate that this vCenter Server is using vSphere+ / vSAN+ subscription. You will also find a similiar UI entry for each ESXi host that is managed by that vCenter Server, but this is actually irrelevant because all ESXi hosts are automatically subscribed once you have converted your vCenter Server to subscription.

How about checking whether a vCenter Server is using a subscription via Automation?

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