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Quick Tip – How to Rename a vSAN Virtual Machine and its files

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While renaming a vSphere Virtual Machine is very straightforward using the vSphere UI or API, this operation only updates the display name in the vSphere Inventory. To ensure the underlying VM configuration files (e.g. .vmdk, .vmx, etc. ) are also updated, a Storage vMotion is also required, which requires you to have at least two vSphere Datastores to perform the operation.

If Storage vMotion is not an option, you only have a single datastore or you are using vSAN, then your only option is to manually rename the individual VM files. For vSAN-based VMs, one additional step is required as vSAN manages objects and not files.

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vSAN ESA Disk & HCL workaround for VCF 9.0

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vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) has become the preferred architecture when deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those interested in exploring vSAN ESA with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 but may not have compatible hardware from the vSAN ESA HCL, there are a couple of workarounds that you might want to be aware of.

UPDATE (09/29/25) - As of VCF 9.0.1, you no longer need to deploy the vSAN ESA Hardware Mock VIB, please see this blog post for more details which will allow you to easily bypass this check directly within the VCF Installer.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk. For production deployments, you should be using supported vSAN ESA Hardware which you can refer to Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG)

There are potentially two scenarios you may come across when using vSAN ESA to deploy your initial and/or extending your VCF Fleet.

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Automating the vSAN Data Migration Pre-check using vSAN API

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I was chatting with a customer yesterday on various automation topics and one of the questions was about automating the vSAN Data Migration Pre-Check capablitity, which is available in the vSphere UI under vSAN Cluster->Monitor->vSAN->Data Migration Pre-check as shown in the screenshot below.


The specific vSAN API that you will need to use is both the VsanPerformResourceCheck to perform the operation and then VsanGetResourceCheckStatus to retrieve the results as the operation can take some time depending on the size of your environment.

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