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Instant Clone Microsoft Windows & VM Keystroke VMworld demo and code posted

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Apologies for the delay in getting my VMworld 2018 demo and code posted online, I know a number of you have been asking about the Windows Instant Clone samples to get an idea on how to create your own customization scripts for managing more "recent" Microsoft Windows releases 😉 and perhaps you might even consider submitting a pull request to share with the community. I have posted both the videos and code samples below. Enjoy and happy Automating!

Instant Clone Microsoft Windows

To demonstrate the power of the newly re-architected Instant Clone feature in vSphere 6.7 and to help make the point clear that the Instant Clone feature is really Guest Operating System agnostic, meaning you can Instant Clone any to Virtual Machine that can run VMware Tools, I thought it would be fun to see how old of a Microsoft OS that I could Instant Clone. After a bit of trial/error, that turned out to be Windows 98 and Windows 2000 🙂

Windows 98 Demo


Windows 2000 Demo


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Managing Distributed Firewall Rules in VMC using PowerShell & NSX-T Policy API

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Back in November 2018, VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) SDDC 1.5 Patch 1 was released and it was one of the most highly anticipated release by our customers. Although this was a "patch" release, it included a ton of new features and also brought the full power of the NSX-T platform to VMC as a generally available feature!

With NSX-T, customers also now have access to the highly requested Distributed Firewall (DFW) capability which enables granular control over East-West traffic between application workloads. In addition to enabling micro-segmentation in VMC, customers can now easily manage DFW rules using a number of grouping constructs (Tags, Virtual Machines & Conditional Statements) to create dynamic policies which follow their workloads.


Customers can configure DFW (as well as Edge Firewall) rules using the VMC Console UI but many of you have been asking for an automated method, especially if you need to create a large number of policies for more than a couple of workloads. After returning from the holiday, I spent the last couple of days updating my NSX-T Policy PowerShell Module which now includes basic support for managing DFW. For those of you who are new to using the NSX-T Policy API and PowerCLI, be sure to give these two articles a read here and here before proceeding further.

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Can a VM in the VMC Compute Network access the SDDC Management Network?

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Similiar to an on-premises vSphere deployment, VMware Cloud on AWS follows good security practices by isolating and preventing access to the SDDC Management Network including Virtual Machines running in the Compute Network. With that said, the SDDC can be configured to enable access to the SDDC Management Network for either all or subset of workloads running in the Compute Network.

I have seen this request come up a few times, usually around proof of concepts, lack of on-premises infrastructure or wanting to run completely isolated within VMC for Dev/Test purposes. Below are the step by step instruction on setting this up for both an NSX-V and NSX-T based SDDC. Once enabled, customers can access the vCenter vSphere UI from within the specified Virtual Machine(s) including using tools like OVFTool or PowerCLI for importing new or existing workloads.

Note: Please refer to this blog post here to determine if you are running an NSX-V or NSX-T based SDDC.

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