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Support for read-only VMDK in vSphere 8.0 Update 2

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vSphere 8.0 Update 2 was just announced last week at VMware Explore and it brings a lot of exciting new capabilities, check out this What's New in vSphere 8.0 Update 2 and What's New in vSAN 8.0 Update 2 blog posts for a nice summary of all the new features.

While doing some testing in my vSphere 8.0 Update 2 lab, I came to learn about a really cool feature that has been requested by customers over the years, which is the ability to configure a read-only virtual disk (VMDK). The most common use case for this feature is being able to share a single VMDK across multiple Virtual Machines and prevent any changes to the original data, a common scenario for VMware App Volumes or VMware Horizon environments.

I could also see this capability get leveraged by users as a way to distribute and install software where traditional application management systems are unavailable but still ensuring that workloads can not manipulate or modify the original files, definitely opens the door for some interesting capabilities.

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First look at Project Keswick

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VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO) was announced at VMware Explore US last week and one of the components that it is built on is using something called Project Keswick.

In fact, at VMware Explore, Project Keswick was officially launched and is now available for customers to try out! I was fortunate enough to attend the Project Keswick technical deep dive session in person, but if you were not able to make the session or you were not at VMware Explore, the session recording is already available online for free to watch #VIB2169LV Scaling and Deploying ESXi at the Edge with Desired State Management and GitOps.

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Changing the default HTTP(s) Reverse Proxy Ports on ESXi 8.0 Update 1

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Pre-ESXi 8.0 Update 1, if you needed to modify the default ESXi HTTP(s) Reverse Proxy Ports, you would simply edit the HTTP reverse proxy configuration file, which I have previously blogged about HERE (pre-ESXi 8.0) and HERE (ESXi 8.0).

For ESXi 8.0 Update 1, the process is slightly diffrent as all ESXi configurations including configuration files have been completely migrated to the new ESXi Configuration Store, which was initially introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 1, which you can learn more about it HERE and HERE.

While most users stick with the system defaults with port 80 (HTTP) and port 443 (HTTPS), I know there are some organizations that require these ports to be changed to meet certain internal compliance requirements. Below are the updated instructions for modifying the ESXi HTTP(s) Reverse Proxy Ports when using ESXi 8.0 Update 1 or later.

Disclaimer: VMware does not officially support modifying the default HTTP/HTTPS ports on an ESXi host.

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