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Quick Tip - Retrieving vSAN usage & overhead information using vSAN API

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Within the vSphere UI, you can view a detailed breakdown of your vSAN storage utilization including various system overhead by selecting a specific vSAN Cluster and then navigating to Monitor->vSAN->Capacity as shown in the screenshot below.


Different vSAN configuration such using vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) or vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) and whether capabilities like vSAN Deduplication and Compression is enabled will yield different utilization metrics that are displayed.

I recently had an inquiry asking how to retrieve the vSAN Deduplication and Compression overhead information using PowerCLI?

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Quick Tip - vSAN ESA Cluster Health Check returns Error message: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

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A fellow colleague was having some problems with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) CLI Installer when using the vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) bootstrap method, which automatically the configures vSAN ESA on a physical ESXi host before deploying the VCSA on top of the vSAN ESA Datastore.


Whether he manually downloaded the vSAN JSON HCL or generated his own custom vSAN ESA HCL, the VCSA Installer would fail with the following error:

Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

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Quick Tip - Suppress in-guest VMware Tools update notifications

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If you have a Virtual Machine that has VMware Tools installed and a newer version is available, end users within the guest operating system might see a status bar notification with the following message:

A newer version of Tools is available for this VM

Most organizations already have a well defined process in rolling out new software updates including VMware Tools, so while the in-guest notification about a new version of VMware Tools can be useful for some, it either not applicable or adds unnecessary distractions for their end users. I recently learned that you can disable these in-guest notification by applying one of the following configurations:

Windows

  • Disable VMware Tools notification at system Level
    • Set the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware Tools\ShowTray to 0 (REG_DWORD)
  • Disable VMware Tools In-Guest Notification at the user Level
    • Set the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware Tools\ShowTray to 0 (REG_DWORD)

Feedback has already been acknowledge to add this information to the official VMware Tools documentation and that it may be possible to configure these notification settings using the VMware Tools configuration file (tools.conf) in the future, further simplifying any configurations related to VMware Tools.