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Using PowerCLI & vSAN Management API to list VMs w/Thick VM swap

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Earlier this year, I had put together a Python script using the vSAN Management API to help customers easily identify Virtual Machines which have Thick VM swap while running on vSAN. You can find the full details in Duncan's blog post here. The reason I had chosen Python over something like PowerCLI, which I frequently use now, is that I had found a bug within the Storage PowerCLI module which prevented me from accessing the required vSAN Management API.

With the release of PowerCLI 6.5.4 today, this issue has now been resolved and I have created the equivalent PowerCLI script called VSANVMThickSwap.ps1 which includes a function called Get-VSANVMThickSwap to retrieve the exact same information as the Python script.

To use the function, you simply pass in the name of a vSAN Cluster as shown in the screenshot below and the script will return all powered on VMs that have been configured with Thick VM Swap.

External replication of vSphere Content Library

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As the adoption of vSphere Content Library continues to grow, I am seeing more questions from our field and customers around content distribution. In case you did not know, vSphere Content Library (CL as I will be refering to it going forward) has its own built-in native replication mechanism which allows customers to easily publish and subscribe to libraries from either within a single vCenter Server instance or even between two completely different vCenter Servers (regardless of deployment topology and/or SSO Domain configurations).


Content distribution or replication is handled by CL which is a service within the vCenter Server. If content is being replicated from within a single vCenter Server and the ESXi hosts can communicate with each other, then direct host to host transfer is used, also referred to as Network File Copy (NFC), rather than going through vCenter Server. When content is transfered between two vCenter Servers, then the data travels through vCenter Server using standard HTTPS (443) by default. In the latter scenario, if you have configured Enhanced Linked Mode for your vCenter Servers, then NFC will be used unless ESXi hosts can not communicate with each other than, it will automatically fall back to the default HTTPS which is pretty cool.

One thing that may not be very well known is that customers actually have a choice in how their CL content is replicated. In addition to native replication which currently does not support incremental/delta updates, meaning all file transfers are full copies, CL can also support external replication. In fact, many customers today already have existing methods for efficiently replicating large amounts of data across multiple datacenters whether that is replication built into their storage arrays, network appliances or some other means. For these customers, you can still benefit from CL while continue to take advantage of your existing methods of replication.


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Updating OVF properties for a VM using vSphere API and PowerCLI 

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Deploying a new OVA/OVF containing OVF properties that need to be configured is super easy using PowerCLI's Get-OvfConfiguration and Import-VApp cmdlets. Many examples can be found online including the PowerCLI Deployment Github repository.

However, once an OVA/OVF has been deployed and running as a standard Virtual Machine, I found there were no out of the box cmdlets for manipulating the OVF properties for a VM as shown in the screenshot below.


Online searches also did not yield any results and hence the opopournity and article 🙂

Just like any VM reconfiguration, you will need to use the vSphere API ReconfigVM_Task() and to update various OVF settings for a VM, you will need to pass in VAppConfigSpec along with a VAppPropertySpec containing the individual OVF property values to update.

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