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Quick Tip - vCenter Server Advanced Settings Reference

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Simliar to my ESXi Advanced and Kernel Settings reference, I was recently asked about creating one for vCenter Server to capture all the default out of the box advanced settings.

With some automation in place, I deployed all major releases of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) from 6.7 to 8.0 which is available in this repo: https://github.com/lamw/vc-advanced-settings


For those interested, here is the one-liner PowerCLI code to retrieve all vCenter Server advanced settings:

Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity ($global:DefaultVIServer)

Quick Tip - How to monitor when ESXi filesystem and partitions are filling up?

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Here is another tidbit on how you can leverage the power of vSphere Events, which now includes over 2K+ as of vSphere 8.0 Update 1 to help monitor when an ESXi filesystem and/or partition is low on disk space.

With vSphere 6.7 or later, we have two events that you can use to help alert when either an ESXi ramdisk (e.g. /var) or VFAT partition (e.g. bootbanks) has filled up.

  • Ramdisk: esx.problem.visorfs.ramdisk.full
  • VFAT: esx.problem.vfat.filesystem.full.other

When either of these occur, you can easily find them under the Monitor->Events section for an ESXi host as shown in the screenshot below.

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Is the vCenter Server Unique ID still important today?

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When I was a customer back in the day, one of my operational checklist items for deploying a vCenter Server was to configure the vCenter Server ID and ensure that it was unique from other vCenter Servers within my environment.


The vCenter Server ID is a value between 0-63 that is randomly generated by default, but it can updated by a user after the vCenter Server has been deployed.

Why should you care about the vCenter Server ID? vCenter Server uses this ID to generate Virtual Machine MAC Addresses and if two vCenter Servers have the same ID, it can potentially generate duplicate VM MAC Addresses as explained in this VMware KB 1024025.

With this background in mind, is having a unique vCenter Server ID still relavent and applicable today in 2022?

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