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NFS Multi-Connections in vSphere 8.0 Update 1

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The upcoming vSphere 8.0 Update 1 release includes a lot of exciting new features, some of which you can learn about by listening to either The Unexplored Territory and VirtuallySpeaking Podcasts, both of which covered the vSphere 8.0 Update 1 launch announcement. One of the highlighted core storage platform feature is the long awaited NFS capability that will allows users to select and isolate a specific VMKernel interface as shown in the screenshot below.


This actually reminded me of another interesting NFS capability that will also be part of the upcoming vSphere 8.0 Update 1 release, which is for ESXi to support multiple TCP connections for a single NFS v3 volume, also referred to as nconnect for those familiar with this NFS capability.

For those interested in this new NFS capability, it is important to note that this setting will initially only be configurable by using either the vSphere API or ESXCLI directly on an ESXi host.

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Is my vSphere Cluster managed by vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) as a Desired Image or Baseline?

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Prior to vSphere 7.0, ESXi lifecycle management has been provided by vSphere Update Manager (VUM), which has been around for more than a decade plus and is most likely what you are still using today. With the release of vSphere 7.0, VMware introduced a brand new lifecycle management solution for ESXi called vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), which you can read more about HERE.


While VMware has made it clear that vLCM will be the future going forward for ESXi lifecycle management, we also understand that most customers will still be using the existing VUM-based solution and we wanted to make sure it was easy to  transition between the two solutions, especially within the vSphere UI.

An interesting question was recently brought up was how to determine whether a vSphere Cluster was using the new vLCM solution based on desired images versus VUM, which uses baselines?

Note: If you are not familiar between vLCM Desired Image and VUM Baselines, be sure to check out this helpful resource HERE.

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Quick Tip - How to deploy vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) to legacy CPU without VMX Unrestricted Guest feature?

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I recently had a customer reach out who was having an issue deploying the latest vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 8.x to an ESXi host that had a CPU that was no longer supported. After the VCSA OVA was uploaded by the VCSA (UI/CLI) installer, it fails to power on the VM with the following error message:

The Intel "VMX Unrestricted Guest" feature is necessary to run this virtual machine on an Intel processor

This problem is only observed with older legacy CPUs that do not support some of the modern CPU instructions that is expected by most workloads today. There is workaround for those that still wish to run on unsupported hardware, which may yield other unexpected behaviors, by adding a VM Advanced Setting monitor.allowLegacyCPU = TRUE

However, there is a chicken/egg problem that user was not able to add this setting before the VM was automatically powered on by the VCSA Installer.

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