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vCenter Converter 6.4 Beta is now LIVE

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To add to the exciting release week for VMware, I am happy to share that the vCenter Converter team has just released a public beta for their next upcoming 6.4 release!

If you are an existing vCenter Converter beta participant, you can head over to the vCenter Converter Beta Community https://communities.vmware.com/t5/vCenter-Converter/ct-p/5385 to download the latest release. If you wish to join the Beta program, simply register for free at https://www.vmware.com/learn/1645300_REG.html

UPDATE (05/11/23) - vCenter Converter 6.4 has officially GA'ed and can now be downloaded from HERE.

There are lots of exciting new updates with vCenter Converter 6.4 such as support for vSphere 8 and another highly requested feature is ability to convert from an Amazon EC2 instance to a vSphere-based VM! For more details, please refer to release notes which can be found HERE.

  • Added support for NVMe disk controllers
  • Added support for paravirtual SCSI disk controllers
  • Added support for virtual machine compatibility up to hardware version 20
  • Added support for VMware vCenter version 8.0 and VMware ESXi version 8.0
  • Аdded support for VMware Workstation version 17 and VMware Fusion version 13
  • Added conversion support for Amazon EC2 instances (from AWS EC2 to VMware vSphere or VMware Cloud on AWS)
  • Added conversion support for UEFI secure boot
  • Added conversion support for Microsoft VBS
  • Improved the overall security of vCenter Converter

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