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PowerShell for PhotonOS on Raspberry Pi 3

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Did you know VMware PhotonOS can also run on a Raspberry Pi (rPI) 3? I definitely did not until recently when I found out the latest 3.0 version also had an image for the rPI. This is great for anyone who is already familiar with PhotonOS and wish to run it in an even smaller form factor such as an rPI. There are definitely some interesting use cases for an rPI such as a tiny management host, troubleshooting tool for consultants or even a quick PowerShell/PowerCLI host that contains some basic tools and scripts which you can quickly access.

I was definitely interested in getting PowerShell and PowerCLI running on top PhotonOS on the rPI. Although you can already run PowerShell on an rPI using the Raspbian OS, the current distribution from Microsoft is actually only 32-Bit, which is a problem for PhotonOS as it is a 64-Bit OS. I was about to give up but while browsing the Microsoft PowerShell repo, I came across their upcoming PowerShell 6.2.0 (Preview) release which now looks to include a 64-Bit ARM build, which is exactly what I needed. For PowerCLI, although I was able to get the modules loaded, I was not able to connect to a vCenter Server or ESXi endpoint, you can find more details at the bottom of this post.

Below are the instructions for installing PhotonOS on the rPI and getting PowerShell setup:

Step 1 - Download and install the Etcher tool which will be used to flash our rPI

Step 2 - Download and install PhotonOS 3.0 RC rPI image using Etcher


Once PhotonOS has been installed, you can login (default credentials are root/changeme) and we now have PhotonOS running on our rPI!


Next we will install PowerShell as well as the latest PowerCLI modules.
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Automating Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) configuration using vSphere API and PowerCLI

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After publishing my recent article on the new the vSphere Health capability which takes advantage of VMware's Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), I had a couple of folks reach out asking how their customers could check whether CEIP is enabled for a given vCenter Server and if not, how to enable it using Automation. For one of these customers, they had over 25+ vCenter Server, so they were not interested in doing this by hand and nor should they.

For those interested in the vSphere UI, the CEIP settings is configured in the Administration menu under the Deployment section as shown in the screenshot below.


We can also manage the CEIP settings programmatically using vSphere API and this is controlled by an Advanced vCenter Server setting called VirtualCenter.DataCollector.ConsentData. The value of this property is actually a JSON payload as you can see in the screenshot below and when updating this property, we need to update both the change version as well as whether we want CEIP enabled or disabled for a given vCenter Server.

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New VMC API to rename SDDC

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A commonly requested feature in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) is the ability to rename an SDDC. Currently, it is not possible to rename an SDDC after it has been deployed. On Friday, an update was made to the VMC Service to introduce a new VMC API (Tech Preview) that will allow customers to rename their SDDC. The API is just the first step and our UI folks are already working on adding this natively to the VMC UI which I actually got a sneak peak of just a few days ago.

UPDATE (02/11/19) - The ability to rename an SDDC is now also available within the VMC Console UI, so you can use either UI or API to perform this operation.


The new SDDC rename API is very straight forward to use, you simply perform a PATCH operation the specific SDDC /orgs/{orgID}/sddcs/{sddcID} which includes a payload containing the updated name. Below are three ways in which you can easily rename your SDDC, including a UI method for those that want to quickly rename an SDDC and not have to write a single line of code.

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