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Quick Tip - vCenter Server Advanced Settings Reference

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Simliar to my ESXi Advanced and Kernel Settings reference, I was recently asked about creating one for vCenter Server to capture all the default out of the box advanced settings.

With some automation in place, I deployed all major releases of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) from 6.7 to 8.0 which is available in this repo: https://github.com/lamw/vc-advanced-settings


For those interested, here is the one-liner PowerCLI code to retrieve all vCenter Server advanced settings:

Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity ($global:DefaultVIServer)

NVMe Tiering in vSphere 8.0 Update 3 is a Homelab game changer!

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As someone who is always on the lookout for interesting and clever ways to make the most out of your vSphere homelab investment, I was surprised there has not been more noise about the new NVMe Tiering capability in vSphere 8.0 Update 3!?

NVMe Tiering is currently in Tech Preview and it enables ESXi to use an NVMe device as a secondary tier of memory for your workloads, which IMHO makes it one of the killer features in vSphere 8.0 Update 3, especially with some interesting implications for Homelabs!

As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words ...


Picture on the left shows a system with 64GB of memory (DRAM) that is available before enabling NVMe Tiering and on the right, the amount of memory that is available after enabling the NVMe Tiering which is whopping 480GB! 🤯

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Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 Import Lab Deployment Script

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 had just GA'ed last week and it is a packed release with a ton of new capabilities! Creating a brand new VCF environment (greenfield) is generally much easier than converting an existing vSphere-based environment (brownfield) into a compliant VCF environment, which can be quite challenging and our users have been asking for a better solution.

With VCF 5.2, we now have the ability to import or convert an existing vSphere and vSAN environment into either a VCF Management Domain or Workload Domain using a new VCF Import Tool without needing to rebuild your existing environment!

As with anything I do, I typically want my infrastructure setup be fully automated, so that I can actually spend time exploring the actual capability and not waste time deploying or installing the required prerequisites. After spending a few minutes reading through the VCF Import Tool Scenarios and Considerations, I could adapt my Automated vSphere Lab Deployment scripts (here and here) to automatically deploy the required environment, so that I could quickly try out the new VCF Import Tool.

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