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Quick Tip - Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), IP Address Range & Source Domain restrictions available for all VMware Cloud Services

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A lesser known capability of the VMware Cloud Console is that we support a number of different authentication policies that can be configured to provide more secure access and/or restrict who can access the different VMware Cloud Services like VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere+, vSAN+, VMware Cloud Foundation+ or ANY other VMware Cloud Service for that matter within your VMware Cloud Organizations(s)!

To configure the authentication policies, you will need to have the Organization Admin role and then click on "View Organization" under your user name and then navigate to Organization->Authentication Policy. In addition to configuring Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), users also have the option of configuring IP Address Range (allow/deny rules) and Source Domain (allow) restriction policies as shown in the screenshots below.


For more details, please refer to the official VMware Cloud Services documentation on configuring these different authentication policies.

Lastly, you can also configure Enterprise Federation which allows you to login to the VMware Cloud Console using your desired identity provider, which is another frequently asked question.

Quick Tip - How to check if vSAN TRIM/UNMAP is enabled in VMware Cloud on AWS Cluster?

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While the original question was for checking whether a specific VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A) cluster has the vSAN TRIIM/UNMAP feature enabled, the solutions below is applicable to any recent vSAN 7.x or 8.x deployment. There are two ways you check, either using the vSphere UI by selecting the cluster and navigating to Configure->vSAN->Services and expanding the Advanced Options tile or simply leveraging PowerCLI and the vSAN API to retrieve the exact same information.

vSphere UI

vSAN API using PowerCLI

$clusterName = "Cluster-1"
$vsanConfigSystem = Get-VsanView -Id VsanVcClusterConfigSystem-vsan-cluster-config-system
$clusterMoRef = (Get-Cluster $clusterName).ExtensionData.MoRef
$vsanConfigSystem.VsanClusterGetConfig($clusterMoRef).unmapConfig

 

Using vCenter Converter 6.3 with vSphere 8 or VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A)

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Since the announcement that vCenter Converter was re-returning, customers have been looking forward to the day that vCenter Converter would be an officially supported product again. Luckily, folks did not have to wait long from the early beta almost a month ago and just a couple of days ago, vCenter Converter 6.3 has officially GA'ed!

The goal of this initial vCenter Converter release was to bring functional parity with the last supported release, updated development and security practices and a few minor enhancements including some new Guest Operating Systems and vSphere 7.0 support. The team still has a ton in store for subsequent releases and if there are certain features you really want to see, feel free to leave a comment and I will be sure to share it with PM/Engr team.

With that said, I have also been getting a lot of questions from customers interested in using Converter to migrate workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A), especially as they think about modernizing and consolidating their Datacenter infrastructure. While, VMware Cloud on AWS as a destination will be in scope for the next release, I was curious on whether it would work given that vSphere 7.0 support was added to latest vCenter Converter release.

You know what happens when I get curious ... I just have to try it out! 😅

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