Happy 2025! 🎉 Here is a fun one to kick off the New Year ☺️
Last year, I demonstrated a method for customizing the SMBIOS hardware string using Nested ESXi, but the solution was not perfect and required hacking up a VM ROM file and it was also limited to using the BIOS firmware for your Nested ESXi VM as the behavior for EFI firmware was different.
I was doing some research towards the end of last year and I came across a much more elegant solution that works for both physical and virtual ESXi!
Not all vSphere-based VMs are the same! This is especially true with the introduction of vSphere IaaS (formally known as vSphere Supervisor or vSphere with Tanzu or Project Pacific) which includes a modern way of provisioning a traditional/classic VM but also a new VM-based form factor known as vSphere Pod VMs.
There was a recent question internally about how you could you distinguish between traditional/classic VMs built from vSphere UI or API versus the vSphere Pod VMs using PowerCLI and specifically using the default Get-VM cmdlet?
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?