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Quick Tip - Inventory core count for vSphere+, vSAN+ & VCF+ Cloud Service

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vSphere+ and vSAN+ was launched last year as a new cloud service and the unit of consumption are CPU cores, which needs to be determined prior to purchasing a subscription for either cloud services. To help customers inventory their existing vSphere and vSAN CPU core usage, especially useful for general visibility and planning purposes, I had developed a simple PowerCLI function that was published last year as a VMware KB article (89116).

In recent weeks, I had noticed an increased number of inquiries from our field and customers on how to assess their existing vSphere and vSAN environment for transition to vSphere+ and vSAN+ and I realized that many folks may not have been aware of the scripts and the KB article that was available.

Once you have downloaded the PowerCLI script, imported the function and connect to an existing vCenter Server environment, you can then use the Get-vSpherePlusCPUSocketToCoreUsage function which will automatically retrieve all ESXi hosts within your vCenter Server and display the current CPU core usage, vSphere+ Cores and vSAN+ Cores required as shown in the example screenshot below.

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Quick Tip - Automating allowed and not allowed Datastores for use with vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS)

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One of the recent features of the vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) is the ability configure the vSphere Datastores that vCLS is allowed to use to provision the required service VMs, which can be on a vSphere Cluster under Configure->vSphere Cluster Services->Datastores as shown in the screenshot below.


In addition to the vSphere UI, you can also programmatically update this configuration using the vSphere API and with tools like PowerCLI as one of the interfaces to the API.

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Applying additional security hardening enhancements in ESXi 8.0

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While responding to a few ESXi security configuration questions, I was referencing our ESXi Security documentation, which includes a lot of useful information and latest best practices. It is definitely worth re-reviewing this section from time to time to take advantage of all the ESXi security enhancements to help protect and secure your vSphere environment.

In certain areas of the ESXi security documentation, I noticed that it mentions CLI and API, but it does not always provide an example that customers can then reference and use in their Automation, which is really the only guaranteed method to ensure configurations are consistent across your vSphere environment. After answering some of the security related questions, especially on the Automation examples, I figure it would be useful to share this information more broadly so that folks are aware of some of the new and existing security enhancements along with some of their implications if you are not implementing them.

Speaking of new ESXi security enhancements, one of the new features that was introduced in ESXi 8.0 is the ability to disable ESXi Shell access for non-root users. While this might sound like a pretty basic feature, applying this towards the vCenter Server service account vpxuser can help add another layer of protection for your ESXi hosts against attackers. It turns out that users with ESXi Shell access can also modify other local users password on ESXi host including the root user. By restricting ESXi Shell access for the vpxuser, you prevent attackers, which can also be insiders who have access to vCenter Server the ability to just change the ESXi root password without knowing the original password. As a result, this can lock you out of your ESXi hosts or worse, enable an attacker to encrypt your workloads, especially as the rise ransomeware attacks has been increasing.

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