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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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Improved vSAN capacity usage reporting APIs in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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As with any new VMware software release, I always love geeking out and taking a look at the new APIs have been added and/or updated that can benefit our users. Having spent some time automating various aspects of vSAN, I came across a couple of new vSAN capacity usage reporting APIs (vSphere API & vSAN Management API) that were introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 3 that I thought was worth mentioning.

While vSAN already had an existing capacity API by using the querySpaceUsage() method as part of the VsanSpaceReportSystem, it did not provide granular information about the raw storage capacity that was claimed by vSAN, whether that was for vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) or vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA).

As part of the VsanVcClusterConfigSystem, there is now a new vSAN API called getClaimedCapacity() that will return the raw capacity in bytes for all claimed disks for vSAN OSA and/or ESA which is also useful for those looking to understand their tebibyte (TiB) usage, as that is also  unit of licensing for vSAN storage with the new VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) offers.

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