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Automating Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) configuration using vSphere API and PowerCLI

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After publishing my recent article on the new the vSphere Health capability which takes advantage of VMware's Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), I had a couple of folks reach out asking how their customers could check whether CEIP is enabled for a given vCenter Server and if not, how to enable it using Automation. For one of these customers, they had over 25+ vCenter Server, so they were not interested in doing this by hand and nor should they.

For those interested in the vSphere UI, the CEIP settings is configured in the Administration menu under the Deployment section as shown in the screenshot below.


We can also manage the CEIP settings programmatically using vSphere API and this is controlled by an Advanced vCenter Server setting called VirtualCenter.DataCollector.ConsentData. The value of this property is actually a JSON payload as you can see in the screenshot below and when updating this property, we need to update both the change version as well as whether we want CEIP enabled or disabled for a given vCenter Server.

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Dynamic vSphere Health Checks in vSphere 6.7+

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One really neat feature of the vSphere HTML5 Client that was shipped in vSphere 6.7 is the ability to deliver new data applications that can run in the vSphere UI without requiring customers to update or upgrade their underlying vCenter Server. An example of this is the vSphere Health Check plugin that was included in vSphere 6.7, which I am guessing most folks probably did not even notice, including myself. The vSphere Health plugin is located at the vCenter Server level and under Monitor->Health as shown in the screenshot below.


Unlike a traditional vSphere Plugin, where the code and business logic is local to the vCenter Server and must be updated each time for new functionality, these data applications are actually delivered automatically and more importantly, out-of-band to a vCenter Server patch or upgrade. This means as new functionality is added, customers will automatically get the latest updates without having to do anything. So how does this actually work?

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How to change the default CPU and Memory requirements for deploying the VMC vCenter Cloud Gateway

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When deploying the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCG), there is a minimum amount of vCPU and memory that is required for deployment. For customers who wish to evaluate this solution for non-production usage, such as a lab environment, it would be nice to be able to reduce the requirements purely for testing purposes. Today, the vCPU and Memory is not configurable and is currently encoded within a JSON configuration file as well as the VCG OVA. The fact that this is not part of the installer itself but within the OVA means we can actually change the default 🙂 Below are the instructions for updating the vCPU and Memory requirements for the VCG.

Step 1 - Download the VCG ISO from MyVMware and extract the ISO.

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