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A first look at the new vSphere+ & vSAN+ Cloud Service

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vSphere+ and vSAN+ was just announced this week and if you have not heard the news, I recommend checking out this blog post (includes a nice video with testimonials from early customers and partners) that goes into greater details for the new vSphere+ and vSAN+ offering (hint, it is more than just a subscription). If you prefer audio, the Unexplored Territory crew also covered the vSphere+ and vSAN+ news in their latest podcast Episode #20.

I was also curious about how this new VMware Cloud service would work and rather than reading about it, I had the opportunity to kick the tires and I figure I might as well try it out on my own personal vSphere homelab!

Although I was using our Staging/Development environment for my setup as the new VMware Cloud service has not officially GA'ed, it should give folks an idea of what to expect. I also wanted to share some additional insights and considerations that I had came across for this upcoming new service.

UPDATE (07/25/22) - The free trial for the new vSphere+/vSAN+ service is now available, you can sign up for a 15 day trial at https://vmc.vmware.com/infrastructure/vsphere/overview

Here is your 1st look at the new VMware Cloud vSphere+ and vSAN+ Service!

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First look at the Supermicro E100-12T

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I first came to learn about Supermicro's E100-9W platform last year, which I had first written about here. The E100-9W is a fanless kit that is part of Supermicro's Embedded IoT family and targets similiar use cases to the Intel NUC such as Industrial Automation, Retail, Smart Medical Systems, Kiosks and Digital Signage. Although the E100-9W was just released in 2020, it was actually using a much older Intel 8th Generation CPU due to some constraints with Intel's embedded CPU roadmap.

Supermicro did mention last year that a Tiger Lake-based model was in the works and last week, I just got my hands on a pre-production unit for their 2nd generation of this platform called the E100-12T.

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How to clean up stale vSphere Container Volumes & First Class Disks?

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If you are running and deploying Kubernetes (K8s) which includes vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), you might notice vSphere Container Volumes showing up in the vSphere UI under the Monitor tab for a given vSphere-based Datastore. This is normal and expected as new Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) are being requested as part of deploying K8s-based application that require storage.


Typically, when PVs and PVCs are no longer needed, they should be cleaned up within the K8s layer via kubectl either automatically or manually depending on your provisioning process. When you delete a K8s Cluster, these PVs/PVCs are not automatically cleaned up and its for good reason, you may want to reuse them and the way vSphere supports this is by implementing them as First Class Disks (FCD), which means they are lifecycle independent of a VM.

What happens when the K8s Cluster has been deleted and you actually want to clean up these stale FCDs, how do you go about doing that? This is a question I have seen come up more frequently and there are a few options.

Option 1:

If you happen to be on vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (which was just released yesterday), the vSphere UI has been enhanced to allow users to now delete vSphere Container Volume (see screenshot above). Previously, you could only view the FCDs and reapply a storage policy.

Option 2:

Since vSphere Container Volumes are just FCDs and we have FCD APIs, we can use the API to retrieve information as well as clean them up. The easiest way is to use PowerCLI's Get-CnsVolume and Remove-CnsVolume cmdlets.

Here is an example of deleting the 2GB volume:

Get-CnsVolume -Datastore (Get-Datastore "sm-vsanDatastore") -Name "pvc-db6829ad-e1a9-46e8-ace3-7e7c18187a0d" | Remove-CnsVolume

In the case of standalone FCDs, which could have been manually provisioned or through a backup solution, you can also clean them up by using PowerCLI's Get-VDisk and Remove-VDisk cmdlets respectively:

Get-VDisk -Name "fill-me-in" | Remove-VDisk