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Quickly deploying vSphere IaaS (formerly vSphere with Tanzu) Control Plane Services via YAMLs

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I recently deployed the Local Consumption Interface (LCI) which is a new vSphere IaaS (formerly vSphere with Tanzu) Control Plane Service that was just introduced with the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 3 into my homelab.

While going through the manual vSphere UI deployment, I noticed there were only handful of vSphere IaaS services that are shipped out of the box including the VM Service (VM Operator), Velero vSphere Operator and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Service.


The workflow to register a new vSphere IaaS service is not difficult, but it does take multiple steps from downloading the deployment YAML file, uploading the file to vCenter Server and then confirm the deployment before the deployment of the service begins and this would have to be done for each vSphere IaaS service you wish to deploy!

There has to be a better and more streamline way, especially for those that do not like to click to many times in the UI 😅

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Automating deployment of vSAN Data Protection OVA with PowerCLI

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vSphere 8.0 Update 3 introduces a new vSAN Data Protection capability for the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) and it is currently delivered as a standalone VMware OVA (see Duncan's post in case you are wondering where to download) which, once deployed and configures, enables a new vSphere UI plugin as shown in screenshot below.


After going through the manual (vSphere UI) deployment workflow, which also included some non-traditional input like requiring the raw vCenter Server TLS certificate, I was interested in automating the deployment using PowerCLI.

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VM snapshot retention-based removal in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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VM snapshots are an extremely useful feature in vSphere but they can also be miss-used and retained for much longer than they should, sometimes weeks, months and even years! Sadly, having a forgotten VM snapshot for a year or longer is not actually as rare as you might expect and I have definitely heard some interesting stories from our field and customers.

While cleaning up a recent VM snapshot, I noticed a new option in the delete all snapshot workflow that now allow users to specify the age of the snapshot to remove which is a new feature in the latest release of vSphere 8.0 Update 3.


This makes it easy for administrators to quickly delete old snapshots without having to write any automation, which is typically how most users manage snapshot retention period including an event-driven approach using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution.

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