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Automating subscription and usage retrieval for vSphere+ and vSAN+ Cloud Service

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As a follow-up from my earlier blog post which helps customers inventory their current on-premises vSphere/vSAN CPU usage for use with vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ Cloud Services, this post will focus on how customers can easily inventory their vSphere+ and vSAN+ subscription usage, both manually and through some automation.


Once your on-premises vCenter Server has been converted into a subscription, all usage and billing information is now managed through the VMware Cloud Console (vmc.vmware.com), rather than the License section of the vSphere UI. In fact, you will find that the vSphere UI will be updated to include a new Subscriptions tab which provides a direct link to both the vSphere+ and vSAN+ Cloud Service.

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Blocking vSphere HTML5 VM Console and allowing only Standalone VM Remote Console (VMRC)?

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This was an interesting request that came up on the VMTN community forums asking whether it was possible to block users from accessing the vSphere HTML5 (H5) VM Console in vCenter Server and only allowing access to a VM console through the use of the Standalone VM Remote Console (VMRC) client? What is the use case for this you might ask, well it looks like VM screen resolution was getting change between the two clients and the administrator simply wanted to restrict access to the H5 VM Console and direct users to use only the VMRC Client.

At first, I could not see how this could be accomplished since all of their users already have the "Console interaction" privilege within vCenter Server which allows them to to interact with both VM Console interfaces. I was then reminded of an article that I wrote back in 2021 where a user wanted to restrict access to the vSphere UI interface while still allowing access to vCenter Server through the vSphere API, which used an access policy to restrict access based on a URI endpoint within the vCenter Server Tomcat application configuration.

This gave me an idea to experiment with and see if we could do the same and simply restrict the /ui/vmconsole endpoint which serves the H5 VM Console while still preserving VMRC access.

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Quick Tip - Inventory core count for vSphere+, vSAN+ & VCF+ Cloud Service

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vSphere+ and vSAN+ was launched last year as a new cloud service and the unit of consumption are CPU cores, which needs to be determined prior to purchasing a subscription for either cloud services. To help customers inventory their existing vSphere and vSAN CPU core usage, especially useful for general visibility and planning purposes, I had developed a simple PowerCLI function that was published last year as a VMware KB article (89116).

In recent weeks, I had noticed an increased number of inquiries from our field and customers on how to assess their existing vSphere and vSAN environment for transition to vSphere+ and vSAN+ and I realized that many folks may not have been aware of the scripts and the KB article that was available.

Once you have downloaded the PowerCLI script, imported the function and connect to an existing vCenter Server environment, you can then use the Get-vSpherePlusCPUSocketToCoreUsage function which will automatically retrieve all ESXi hosts within your vCenter Server and display the current CPU core usage, vSphere+ Cores and vSAN+ Cores required as shown in the example screenshot below.

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