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Infinite possibilities with new VM Service CloudInit transport for vSphere with Tanzu in vSphere 8

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When the VM Service capability (part of Sphere with Tanzu) was first introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, I was really excited for the possibilities this feature could unlock for both DevOps personas but also for our VI Admins. Currently, the VM Service can only deploy two specific OVF images (CentOS and Ubuntu) that are pre-built by VMware and distributed from the VMware marketplace.

While the potential for the VM Service is definitely there, our customers and even our partners need the ability to create their own custom images and using approved operating systems that they have built and harden based on the needs of their organizations. Even though I was able to get the VM Service to deploy a non-default image like a Nested ESXi VM using a couple of tricks, there needs to be a much easier and supported way to create and deploy non-default VMware OS images and this is where vSphere 8 can now help 😀

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vSphere Datasets - New Virtual Machine Metadata Service in vSphere 8

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Since the early days of Virtual Center and ESX, the only method for creating and sharing arbitrary metadata between the vSphere Management layer and the guest operating system was to use either guest variables (guestinfo) or the OVF runtime environment.

While both of these capabilities have enabled a ton of interesting use cases and have even inspired creative solutions such as this, this, this, this and this to just name a few, it certainly has its challenges and nuances from an end user experience perspective.

For example, the persistency or the non-persistency of guest variables solely depended on when it was applied to a Virtual Machine and the power state it was in, which can be very frustrating to discover for the first time and the inconsistent behavior for end users. The lack of security and access control in both guest variables and the OVF runtime environment also means the metadata could easily be overwritten or removed by users in either the vSphere Management layer or guest operating system, making this challenging to scale for larger organizations.

This is why I am excited for vSphere 8 and the new vSphere Dataset feature!

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Quick Tip - How to actually disable host encryption mode on ESXi?

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This recent quote from my buddy Timo Sugliani (definitely worth a follow on Twitter), perfectly captures the essence of an issue that I had ran into and I am sure many of you can also relate! 😀

Trying to do ONE thing and deviating to X, Y and Z. The common IT Journey

I was trying to generate an ESXi support bundle to share with Engineering and when ran the "vm-support" command, I was surprised that it failed with the following message:

Command cannot succeed because this host is in crypto safe mode and the vm-support incident key is missing.


I had never seen this message before and I had assumed it was probably due to my recent use of adding vTPM to VM that caused the host encryption mode to get enabled on this particular ESXi host. Although there were commands that I could run follow, I actually just wanted to disable it and get the support bundle over to Engineering. I figure I should be able to easily disable it, right?

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