WilliamLam.com

Downgrading new VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licenses to 7.x

by // 5 Comments

When you access your new VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) license in the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP), it is delivered using the new solution license key type  which can activate multiple components within a VVF or VCF deployment.

By default, VVF and VCF licenses will come entitled for latest vSphere 8.0 Update 2b and VCF 5.1.1 respectively, because those are the minimum versions that support the new solution license key type. With that said, users can also downgrade their existing VVF and VCF licenses to support earlier vSphere 8.x and 7.x releases using the BSP license management system, which was something I had recently learned about and went through the process myself, so here is what it looks like end-to-end.

Note: License downgrade requires both user downgrade permissions in the BSP license management as well as using non-NFR licenses, which can obtained through the BSP self-service "Trials and Beta" or internally for employees. For NFR licenses, downgrade is not available.

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Retrieving NSX segment information from vCenter Server

by // Leave a Comment

Since vSphere 7.0, it has been much simpler to correlate between an NSX network segment defined in NSX Manager and its representation as a vSphere Distributed Virtual Portgroup (DVG) in vCenter Server as demonstrated in screenshot below using the vSphere UI.


With the additional NSX information such as NSX Transport Zone ID, Transport Zone ID Name, Logical Switch ID, Segment Name and VNI (Virtual Network Identifier), users can streamline debugging and troubleshooting issues with their network team by quickly providing this relevant information.

I recently had a user ask about retrieving the VNI information for a given NSX segment in vCenter Server using PowerCLI, so here is a quick snippet including other NSX information for those interested.

[Read more...]

Customizing SMBIOS strings (hardware manufacturer and vendor) for Nested ESXi 

by // 11 Comments

Nested ESXi continues to be an invaluable resource that I use on almost a daily basis from solution prototyping, customer reproduction to automated lab deployments supporting both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), the use cases are simply endless!

While you can do almost anything with Nested ESXi, mimicking or simulating specific hardware strings such as the manufacturer or vendor is not really possible or at least very easily. I was recently reminded of this topic again as this has been something I wanted to look into but just not had the time. In fact, some of this was inspired by a conversation I had with fellow colleague Luke Huckaba who found a clever trick playing with the default Virtual Machine boot ROMs which are shipped with both ESXi and our VMware Desktop Hypervisors (Workstation/Fusion).

[Read more...]