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Exploring the new vSphere Privilege Recorder in vSphere 8.0 Update 1

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Determining the minimum vSphere privileges that is required to perform a given vSphere operation (UI/API) has been a huge customer challenge to say the least. Strategies have included guessing along with trial and error by creating a custom vSphere Role and slowly removing privileges until you have identified the minimum required privileges. If you are familiar with the vSphere API and know exactly which API methods and properties are consumed, then you can use the vSphere API Reference since every method and property includes the specific privilege required in the documentation, but this method is pretty tedious and time consuming.

If only we had a way to record all the vSphere privilege that was used for a specific set of operation(s) in vCenter Server ... 🤔

Apparently I missed the initial news, but this was actually one of the new features that was introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 1 called the vSphere Privilege Recorder! 😆

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Quick Tip - New remote version of ESXCLI 8.x

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I was recently made aware of a nice update from our developers that we now have a new version of the remote ESXCLI utility that is much simpler to install across any operating system and is fully backwards compatibility with ESXi hosts running 6.7.x, 7.x and 8.x.

Many of you are probably familiar with the local version of ESXCLI which is available when connecting to ESXi whether that is over SSH or directly in the ESXi Console. However, a remote version of ESXCLI has been available since the introduction of ESXCLI back in vSphere 4.0, but surprisingly, I still come across users who never knew that this was possible!

In the past, the remote version of ESXCLI was platform specific and it was distributed in a number of diffrent ways from being bundled as part of the vSphere CLI (6.7) to being a standalone download (7.0) and this inconsistency brought many challenges, not just from an internal development standpoint but also operationally for users who needed to deploy this utility across their administrative systems.

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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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