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Monitoring vSphere account password & permission changes 

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If it is not clear by now, I REALLY love the power of vSphere Events and all the use cases it can enable, especially when used with our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution to enable easy Event-Driven Automation.

Over the past month or so, I have noticed a series of questions from our field and customers across a number of topics pertaining to vSphere accounts including vSphere Single Sign-On (SSO) users. My response to each of these questions all point back to a leveraging specific vSphere Events and I thought I share some of use cases in which vSphere Events can help

  • When was the last time a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*) password was changed?
  • How much time left (expiry) before the vSphere SSO user password must be changed?
  • Audit of all password changes for an vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*)?
  • Who recently updated the password for a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*)?
  • When was the last time a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*) password was reseted?
  • Who recently added new permission to a vSphere user?
  • Who recently removed a permission from a vSphere user?
  • Who recently updated vSphere Role with additional permissions?
  • Who recently updated vSphere Role and removed permissions?

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Managing VM snapshot retention policies using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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vSphere Snapshots is an amazing technology that has enabled our customers to do so many amazing things from application lifecycle and testing to operating system updates and many other use cases. Like any technology, if it is miss-used, the benefits can quickly turn into challenge or nightmare.

As Peter Parker once said, "With great power comes great responsibility" which I think is one way to summarize VM snapshot usage 😆


I am pretty sure that every VI Admin out there has at least one story about vSphere snapshots gone wrong. Due to the convenience, ease of use and some times miss-understanding of how vSphere snapshot works, it can lead to a number of issues including filling up your storage and impacting other running workloads.

Now, imagine if you could implement a snapshot retention policy for your VM(s) based on the size of a given snapshot or maybe the number of days the snapshot has existed? Would that not be cool!?

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Does vCenter Server recycle VM MAC Addresses after Cross vCenter vMotion?

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I recently received a question from a customer who was concerned that after a VM has been migrated from one vCenter Server to another using Cross vCenter vMotion, that the original source VM MAC Address could potentially be recycled and re-used at a later point. Back in 2015, I actually wrote about this very topic and the concerns around VM MAC Address duplication after a Cross vCenter vMotion, which I highly encourage folks to check out if you have not seen this article already.

While re-reading the article, I realized that the article had primarily focused on vCenter Servers that were in Linked Mode or under the same vSphere Single Sign-On (SSO) domain and although I did mention the Cross vCenter vMotion across across different vSphere SSO domains scenario, it looks like the details were a tad bit light.

To quickly summarize, when a VM is migrated from a source vCenter Server to the designation vCenter Server, the VM's MAC Address is added to a MAC Address "block list" on the source vCenter Server. This ensures that the VM MAC Address will not be reallocated by the source vCenter Server which would cause a network conflict. This has been the default behavior since vSphere 6.0 and no additional configuration change is required by customers.

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