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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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ESXi 8.0 Update 2 not detecting Apple NVMe on Apple Mac Mini 2018

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While official support for running ESXi on Apple Hardware (Mac Pro and Mac Mini) has concluded with ESXi 7.x, it certainly has not discourage users from experimenting with newer ESXi releases. In fact, ESXi 8.x still runs like a champ on most x86 Apple Hardware platforms including the vintage Apple Mac Mini 7,1 (2014) and to the most recent Apple Mac Mini 8,1 (2018)!

For those with an Apple Mac Mini 8,1 (2018), the onboard Apple NVMe storage device can not be used out of the box with ESXi, without the use of the Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling. Surprisingly, the Community NVMe Driver for ESXI Fling is still functional even with the latest ESXi 8.x release, even though it was only created and supported during ESXi 7.x timeframe.


From the recent reports from the VMware Community, the Apple NVMe device can be detected up until ESXi 8.0 Update 1c (Build 22088125) but after upgrading to ESXi 8.0 Update 2 (22380479), it was no longer showing up.

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