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Alan Renouf, and his family, need your help. Please support/donate!

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In case you have not heard, the Bay Area has recently been affected by a number of unprecedented wildfires which has destroyed several hundred thousands acres of land and is no where near containment. Thousands of families have been affected and this week, we found out our good friend Alan Renouf was also impacted and sadly lost his home in the fires.

Luckily, Alan and his family is safe, but as you can see from the devastation below (yes, this was actually his house on the left), it will take a long time to rebuild if that is even possible.


I know many of you know Alan for his work in PowerCLI, vSphere Automation and more recently his efforts in the VMware Office of CTO for Project VXR focused on Virtual and Augmented Reality. Like many, I have also benefited from Alan's work and if you feel the same way and would like to help him and his family out, please consider donating to the GoFundme page below. Like many of the affected families, they are currently staying in a hotel which is being paid out of their own pockets and any amount will go a long way! Please consider sharing this with others in your community that may be able to help and thank you for your help.

Direct GoFundMe URL: https://www.gofundme.com/f/renouf-fire-relief-fund

Quick Tip - Encoding emojis in a Microsoft Teams message using O365 API

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One easy way to integrate with Microsoft Teams is to use an incoming webhook which can be configured on a per-channel basis. While working on creating some new PowerShell functions for the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA), I was stuck trying to figure out how to properly encode an emoji icon into the MessageCard type for sending a message to a teams channel.

After a bit of searching and some trial/error, I finally found that you needed to use the emoji hex code with the following format:

&#x<EMOJI-HEX-CODE>;

I used this site here to find the emoji to hex code translation. In addition, I also found that the emojis will only render when used in either the activityTitle or text property of the MessageCard. I was initially trying use this within the facts property which does not work.

Here is a working PowerShell example on constructing the the MessageCard JSON which utilizes emojis:

$teamsMessage = [PSCustomObject][Ordered]@{
    "@type"      = "MessageCard"
    "@context"   = "http://schema.org/extensions"
    "themeColor" = '0078D7'
    "summary"      = "VMC SDDC Deleted"
    "sections"   = @(
        @{
            "activityTitle" = "&#x1F6A8; **VMC SDDC Deleted** &#x1F6A8;";
            "activitySubtitle" = "In VMC-Customer[0] Organization";
            "activityImage" = "https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2019/07/Icon-2019-VMWonAWS-Primary-354-x-256.png"
            "facts" = @(
                @{
                    "name" = "SDDC:";
                    "value" = "M11-SDDC";
                },
                @{
                    "name" = "Date:";
                    "value" = "2020-07-12T11:20:03.364000Z";
                },
                @{
                    "name" = "User:";
                    "value" = "*protected email*";
                }
            );
            "markdown" = $true;
            "text" = "&#x1F629; This is the text field &#x1F629;";
        }
    )
}

$body = $teamsMessage | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 5
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $teamsWebhookURL  -Method POST -ContentType "application/json" -Body $body | Out-Null

Here is what the rendered Microsoft Teams message will looks like posting to the webhook:

Dual Intel M.2 Optane 4801x in Supermicro E300-9D

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For those that have been following along, I have been testing the Supermicro E300-9D (SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP) kit in my home lab which I have written about here. One of the last things I was looking into was storage expandability with this platform, especially since Supermicro has a PCIe Add-On Card (AOC-SLG3-2M2) which can add two additional M.2 devices supporting 2260 (60mm), 2280 (80mm) & 22110 (110mm) form factors.

At the same time, our friends over at Intel had just given me access to a couple of their pre-release Intel M.2 Optane 4801x devices which were then released right before the holiday last year. For those wondering why Optane is so interesting, especially from a vSAN perspective, check out this blog post here from my good buddy Pete Flecha over in our Storage and Availability Business Unit (SABU).


This was actually perfect timing as I was also interested to see if there were any high performance and supported M.2 devices that could be used for for vSAN Caching and this device would definitely fit the bill! When I had initially received all the components, I was scratching my head as the AOC was too big to fit horizontally in the E300-9D.

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