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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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Demo of VMware Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI)

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I recently blogged about the new VMware Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) service, which folks should definitely check out first to learn more about the new cloud service and how you can participate in the early access beta.


I had also recorded a short demo that I had shared with internal teams to showcase how end users would interact and deploy workloads using CCI and the demo recording was very well received.

I decided to re-record the demo along with audio voice over and here is a quick look at the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) in action:

Quick Tip - Downloading ESXi Image (ISO or ZIP) from vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)

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Prior to vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), the creation of an ESXi Image Profile was done separately using the vSphere Image Builder service. If you needed to download a specific ESXi Image Profile (ISO or ZIP) for importing into another environment or to simply create a bootable installer, it was intuitive to download the image within the vSphere UI.

With vLCM, both the ESXi Image and Configuration has been combined and it is now managed at the vSphere Cluster level. A couple of weeks ago, I needed to download a specific ESXi ISO from vLCM and it actually took me a bit of time to figure out where to perform this operation.

I recently came across a VMTN post where the user had the same challenge and realized I was not the only one who could not find the functionality in the vSphere UI.

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