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)
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:
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.
When creating a new vSAN File Share, which is powered by vSAN File Services, additional network access controls (no access, allow access from any IP or custom) can be configured.
To view the configured network permissions, users must expand each file share to get the relevant information. For those interesting in automating the retrieval of this information for reporting and/or compliance purposes, you can use the vSAN Management API and specifically the vSAN queryFileShares() API.
The vSAN File Share API can also be consumed through PowerCLI using the Get-VsanFileShare cmdlet, but the network permission configuration is not part of the default output which might lead users to believe this information is not available.