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Quick Tip - Auditing ESXi boot firmware type

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I had a customer that recently reached out asking how they could easily audit their entire ESXi infrastructure to determine which hosts was still booting using the legacy BIOS firmware, which has been deprecated and will be removed in a future vSphere release, in favor of the industry standard UEFI firmware type.

In vSphere 8.0 Update 2, a new vSphere API property called firmwareType was introduced and added to the ESXi Hardware BIOS info object that makes it very simple to retrieve with the following PowerCLI 1-Liner:

(Get-VMHost).ExtensionData.Hardware.BiosInfo

Here is an example output for an ESXi host booting with UEFI firmware:


Here is an example output for an ESXi host booting with BIOS firmware:


Since this vSphere API property was recently introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 2, if you attempt to use this on an ESXi host that is not running 8.0 Update 2, then you will see the field being blank if you are using a newer release of PowerCLI that understands this new property or it will simply not show if you are using an older version of PowerCLI.


Alternatively, if you still need to retrieve this information, you can go directly to ESXi host via SSH, not ideal but you can use the following VSISH command to retrieve this exact information:

vsish -e get /hardware/firmwareType

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 - Retrieving vSAN File Share Network Permissions using vSAN API & PowerCLI

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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.

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