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Retrieving detailed vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) Image information from vSphere Cluster using PowerCLI

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As more and more users are adopting vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) to simplify the lifecycle and configuration management of their ESXi hosts, you may want to get more information about a given vLCM image that has been associated with a specific vSphere Cluster.

While you can certainly get this information using the vSphere UI, you can also get this detailed information by using the vLCM REST API, which can easily be consumed using variety of vSphere SDK Clients including PowerCLI.

For inventory and/or auditing purposes, automation is typically the answer, especially at scale. I will not bore you with the details, but I recently created the following PowerCLI function called Get-vLCMClusterImageInformation and given the name of a vLCM-enabled vSphere Cluster, it will provide you with the associated ESXi base image and all Solutions and Components that is associated with a given image.

UPDATE (02/06/25) - The script has also been updated to also include information for a vLCM image that has integrated with an Hardware Support Manager (HSM) to provide firmware information.

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Quick Tip - New method to mark HDD to SSD in ESXi 7.x and 8.x using ESXCLI

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I recently helped a colleague who wanted to mark an HDD device in ESXi to show up as an SSD, which may be needed if the storage device was not correctly detected or if you are using Nested ESXi and the underlying storage is not an SSD and you need to mark it as an SSD for use with vSAN OSA or ESA.

The easiest way to accomplish this operation is by using the vSphere UI, but that does require vCenter Server to be up and running, which it was not. Alternatively, you can also perform this operation using ESXCLI and configure an Storage Array-Type Plugin (SATP) claim rules, which had been possible since 2013 but it looks like the old method no longer works in the latest ESXi 7.x and 8.x releases.

Note: If you are configuring this for a Nested ESXi VM, another method is to emulate a virtual SSD as shown in this blog post.

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NVIDIA GPU with Dynamic DirectPath IO (Passthrough) to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster using vSphere with Tanzu

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When provisioning a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster (TKC) using vSphere with Tanzu, you can easily request an NVIDIA GPU resource as part of the deployment, which can either be provided by NVIDIA vGPU or using PCIe passthrough with Dynamic DirectPath IO.

vGPU is great for those with a capable NVIDIA GPU, especially if the GPU will not be utilized 100% and you can share its resources amongst several VMs. However, if you do not have a capable GPU that supports vGPU, you can still provide you TKC workloads with a GPU resource using passthrough.


While playing with the Lenovo P3 Ultra, I unfortunately came to learn that NVIDIA RTX A5500 Laptop was NOT the same as an NVIDIA RTX A5500 🙁

Not ideal, but I guess NVIDIA did not want to add this additional device to their test matrix and hence their ESXi graphics drivers would not detect the GPU as vGPU capable. I knew that I could still use the NVIDIA GPU via passthrough but to my surprise, I just needed to get the NVIDIA drivers installed onto the TKC worker nodes.

That was much easier said than done as all the documentation that I could find on both VMware and NVIDIA website had detailed instructions for vGPU configuration but there was little to no documentation on how to use NVIDIA GPU in passthrough mode with vSphere with Tanzu. I came across a number of different NVIDIA solutions when it comes to k8s, but it was not very clear on which would be interoperable with vSphere with Tanzu and I eventually figured it out with the help pointing me in the right direction.

It was actually super easy, once you knew the exact steps! 😅

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