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Quick Tip - Retrieving vSAN Congestion Health Programmatically

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While catching up on post-Explore email, I received a question from a customer who has a large number of vSAN deployments spanning their ROBO environment. In one of their environment, they had some physical congestion issue that caused some problems for their vSAN stretched cluster and they were looking for a way to monitor the vSAN congestion health, which is available as part of vSAN Health.


Since this information is available as part of vSAN Health, we can certainly leverage the vSAN Health API to retrieve this information programmatically but we can also look at using the PowerCLI Test-VsanClusterHealth cmdlet to get this information in a quicker manner for administrators.

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How to upgrade VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with PVSCSI controller incompatibility?

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If you are running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab using Nested ESXi and you attempt an upgrade workflow, you may find the following upgrade pre-check fail with the following message: VSAN SCSI controller is not VMware certified


You might think you are out of luck, but it is actually pretty straight forward to bypass the checks and still allow the upgrade to proceed, something I recently went through myself when upgrading my VCF 5.1.1 environment to the latest 5.2 release.

Note: To use vSAN ESA in VCF, you should configure your Nested ESXi VM to use an NVMe Controller instead of PVSCSI Controller, so its possible that by changing the controller type, you may not run into this error simliar to findings here. You can also override the vSAN HCL JSON with your own custom HCL JSON which includes the PVSCSI controller by following the blog post here and that would also allow you to proceed, but steps below are the easiest as you do not have to do anything special.

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Managing vSAN internet connectivity configuration using the vSAN API

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I recently received an inquiry from a vSAN customer who was looking to disable the vSAN internet connectivity, which is used pull down the latest vSAN HCL catalog updates and is also used as part of enabling the vSAN File Services.


Rather than using the vSphere UI to disable this configuration, the customer was interested in automating this and was wondering if there was an API that can be used?

While I have explored a large part of the vSAN Management API, this is one area that I had not played with before, which also meant a good learning opportunity!

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