WilliamLam.com

Cross vCenter vMotion workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0

by // Leave a Comment

While vSphere 7.0 officially reached end of support in October 2025, many organizations continue to operate on it, often not by choice, and on hardware that is likely end of life.

An established transition strategy among enterprises is to migrate workloads into a newly deployed environment using the battle tested vSphere vMotion capability.

A lesser known capability introduced with both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 allows non-disruptive migration of workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0, as the minimum supported version of the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is 7.0 as you can see from VDS creation workflow wizard.


Users currently have two supported methods for migrating workloads from their existing vSphere 7.0 environment into either a VVF or VCF 9.0 deployment using the native Cross vCenter vMotion capability.

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Listing all vSphere Privilege Definitions

by // Leave a Comment

By design, the vSphere platform (includes vCenter Server and ESXi) is highly extensible and additional vSphere Events and Privileges can added by 2nd and 3rd party solutions. Similiar to vSphere Events, where you can query your specific vCenter Server (or ESXI hosts) to list all vSphere Event definitions, you can also do the same for vSphere Privileges.

Using PowerCLI, we can use the Get-VIPrivilege cmdlet to help list out the vSphere Privilege Groups and the specific granular vSphere Privileges that exists within deployment.

Here is an example of listing all the different vSphere Privilege Groups that have been defined, either out of the box and/or by 2nd or 3rd party solution:

Get-VIPrivilege -PrivilegeGroup | select id,Description | Sort-Object -Property Id


As of vCenter Server 8.0 Update 3c, there are currently 111 out of the box vSphere Privilege Groups, you may have more or less depending on your version and the number of 2nd/3rd party integrations.

Here is an example of listing all the vSphere Privilege definitions that have been defined, either out of the box and/or by 2nd or 3rd party solution:

Get-VIPrivilege -PrivilegeItem | select id,Description | Sort-Object -Property Id


As of vCenter Server 8.0 Update 3c, there are currently 473 out of the box vSphere Privileges, you may have more or less depending on your version and the number of 2nd/3rd party integrations.

Additionally, you may also find these other vSphere Authorization blog posts useful:

Updated vSphere Login UI customizations for vSphere 7.x & 8.x

by // 2 Comments

It has been more than a decade since the vSphere UI has transition to an HTML-based interface and while not officially supported, users do have the ability to customize the login screen for a variety of use cases from internal disclaimers and compliance to customer branding as I have demonstrated in the past.

Although the general modification process has mostly stayed consistent, there has been subtle changes across vCenter Server releases which I have blogged about here, here and here.

I recently had a few folks ask whether the previous guidance was still applicable to the latest vCenter Server releases and given the previous articles were focused on vSphere 6.0 and 6.5, I figured its time for an update 🙂

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

Here is an example of one of my development vCenter Servers running the latest 8.0 Update 3 release ... I wonder if would make the cut as a feature enhancement for a default theme? ?

via GIPHY

[Read more...]