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Easily audit ESXi boot options programmatically in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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ESXi (kernel) boot options can be added during ESXi boot up (by pressing SHIFT+O) or by updating the ESXi boot.cfg configuration to influence specific configurations and/or behaviors.

In the past, it was difficult to get visibility across your fleet of ESXi hosts on which hosts might be using custom boot options, especially in cases where you might not need them anymore or worse if someone has manually added a configuration that you did not intend.

In vSphere 8.0 Update 3, a new bootCommandLine property has been added to the vSphere API and can now provide full visibility into all boot options used for a given ESXi host.

PowerCLI 13.3 had also GA'ed yesterday, which supports latest APIs introduced in both vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2  and you can easily access this new property by running the following command:

(Get-VMHost).ExtensionData.Hardware.SystemInfo

Useful vSphere Automation techniques for assisting with CrowdStrike remediation

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By now, you have probably heard about or have directly been impacted by the recent CrowdStrike software update to Microsoft Windows system causing an unprecedented global outage. I know IT administrators are working around the clock to remediate thousands if not tens of thousands of Windows systems, the current recommended remediation process from CrowdStrike is definitely painful since it requires users to go into Windows safe mode to remove the offending file. To further complex things, most organizations enable Microsoft Bitlocker, which adds additional step to the already painful manual remediation process as you now have to locate your recovery keys before you login to apply the fix.

Within hours of the CrowdStrike news, I already saw a number of inquiries from our customers and field asking if there were any automated solutions or scripts that could aide in their remediation as asking any organization to manually remediate is a non-starter with the scale of deployments for most Enterprises. While getting up to speed on the remediation steps and thinking about how our vSphere platform can help users automate, what is typically a manual task, I had a few ideas that folks might find useful.

Disclaimer: The scripts provided in this article are meant as examples, please test and adapt them based on your own environment as these have not been tested in any official capacity and the behaviors may vary from environment to environment. Please use at your own risk.

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Automating the retrieval & reclamation of VM MAC address blocklist for vCenter Server using the vSphere MOB

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As shared in this blog post HERE and HERE, vCenter Server has a built-in mechanism for managing VM MAC addresses where the original VM has been migrated to a different vCenter Server (regardless of the vCenter SSO Domain) using a VM MAC Address blocklist.

The VM MAC address blocklist functionality is still only available using a private API and the only way to find out what VM MAC addresses are currently in the list is by interactively using the vSphere MOB and the fetchRelocatedMACAddress API.

Recently, I had a question from a customer who was looking to clear the VM MAC address blocklist and was wondering if that was possible and whether there was an API to perform this operation?

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