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Synology NFS VAAI Plug-in support for vSphere 8.0

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After sharing my recent Synology DS723+ setup for my Homelab, where I initially decided on using iSCSI storage since it had out of the box support for VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), I had received a number of comments and recommendations to actually stay away from iSCSI and just use NFS due to the various inconsistent and performance issues that other users have observed with the Synology.

The only reason I opted for iSCSI was purely for its VAAI support, I certainly would have preferred to use NFS for its simplicity of setup and management. Timing could not have been better as I recently came to learn on the VMware Reddit channel, u/MrGimper had shared an update that they were successful in installing and consuming the latest version of the Synology NFS VAAI Plug-In (2.0-1109) on an ESXi 8.0 system, even though vSphere 7.0 was the highest supported version from Synology.

Disclaimer: Synology does not officially support vSphere 8.0, please use at your own risk. I did hear back from Synology and their current stance on support for vSphere 8.0 with their NFS VAAI Plug-In is that "They do not know when the next version will be supported".

I had considered installing the latest Synology VAAI plug-in but I figured since vSphere 8.0 was not listed as supported, that it probably would not install but this actually gave me some hope, so I decided to try this out on my vSphere 8.0 Update 1 setup.

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Retrieving vCenter Server certificate (Machine, VMCA Root, STS & Trusted Root) details using the vSphere API 

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In the vSphere UI, users can easily view and manage all of their vCenter Server certificates by navigating to Administration->Certificate->Certificate Management as shown in the screenshot below.


There are four types of vCenter Server certificates: Machine SSL, VMware Certificate Authority, STS Signing Certificate and the Trusted Root. On the main summary view, we can see the validity of the certificate, which is useful to quickly determine if you need to plan on replacing a specific certificate. We can also get more information about a specific certificate by clicking on the "View Details".

A question recently came up internally asking whether there is a vSphere API to retrieve all of this information programmatically, especially the validity of the certificate?

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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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