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Quick Tip - Retrieving the vSAN Rekey Interval using PowerCLI

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Since the release of vSAN 6.5.1, the PowerCLI team has introduced a number of high level vSAN cmdlets (current list HERE) that can be used to automate a variety of tasks. While the existing vSAN cmdlets are quite extensive and continues to get updated with new functionality, it will never be able to cover the rich set of functionality that is provided by vSAN.

For functionality that is not available in the high level vSAN cmdlets, user can still perform the task using PowerCLI, but they will need to directly access the underlying API, in this case the vSAN Management API.

Note: This concept also applies to other high level PowerCLI cmdlets, if you are unable to locate the functionality, then most likely you will need to interrogate the API using PowerCLI.


In the case of retrieving the vSAN Data-in-transit encryption rekey interval, which is not available in the high level Get-VsanClusterConfiguration cmdlet, we can easily retrieve it with the following PowerCLI snippet:

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vSphere UI behavior change for VM Disk I/O Shares & Limits in vSphere 8.x

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If you use the vSphere UI to configure individual virtual disk I/O shares or limits for a Virtual Machine, it looks like this functionality has been removed in vSphere 8.x in favor of using VM Storage Policies, which has been around for almost a decade now.

Prior to vSphere 8.x, you could configure both disk shares and limits on an individual VMDK as shown in this screenshot below for a vSphere 7.x environment:


While this capability can be useful, it does come with some operational overhead of having to configure each and every virtual disk that has such a requirement and can certainly be error prone. Fortunately, this problem of defining various storage requirements and attributes for a VM and its virtual disks has already been solved with Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) and the use of VM Storage Policies.

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Retrieving and translating CPUID features for a vSphere VM

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Whether you are using the classic Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) on a vSphere Cluster or the new Per-VM EVC capability, the usable (user-level) CPU features from an ESXi host are then presented down into a Virtual Machine for consumption.

If you wanted to see what which CPU features are exposed for a particular VM or even custom CPU compatibility mask which hides certain CPU features, you can do so by using the vSphere API and accessing either the FeatureRequirement or FeatureMask properties, depending if Per-VM EVC is configured or not. The results from the vSphere API is a list of CPUID strings that may or may not be easy to translate to the friendly CPU processor feature name.

While doing some testing, I noticed that for VMs configured with Per-VM EVC, rather than listing out the CPUID strings, it actually lists the friendly CPU processor feature name.


I was not able to find any CPUID translator using the EvcManager API, but the vSphere UI must be getting this information somehow, right? After a bit of poking around in my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), I realized how this translation was occurring ...

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