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Updated Inventory & Calculator Scripts for counting Cores/TiBs for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF)

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Here are two new tools to help our users understand and calculate the required subscription capacity for the new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) offerings, which are licensed based on physical CPU Cores for compute and total raw physical storage (TiBs) for vSAN.

Inventory Script

The PowerCLI script provided in KB 95927 is designed to help users inventory their existing vSphere environment (read-only account is sufficient) to assess the required VCF or VVF subscription capacity for compute and/or vSAN. The script has also been enhanced to incorporate the upcoming 100GiBs of vSAN storage entitlement for each VVF core that is provisioned to a vSAN cluster as well as the latest pricing and packaging for both VCF and VVF. For more details on how to download and use the inventory script, please check out the KB for more information.

Note: Make sure you are using the latest version of the script which had a minor update on 02/14/2024

Calculator Script

The PowerShell script provided in KB 96426 is designed to help users run different simulations for calculating the required VCF or VVF subscription capacity for compute and/or vSAN, especially in planning for a new or greenfield deployment. For customers who can not run the inventory script from KB 95927 due to organizational policies, the calculator script can be a viable alternative as long as you can manually provide the required parameters via the CSV input file used by the script. For more details on how to download and use the calculator script, please check out the KB for more information.


If you still have questions or require further assistance on sizing or pricing (including all applicable discounts), please reach out to your local VMware account team and they will be more than happy to help.

Retrieving detailed vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) Image information from vSphere Cluster using PowerCLI

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As more and more users are adopting vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) to simplify the lifecycle and configuration management of their ESXi hosts, you may want to get more information about a given vLCM image that has been associated with a specific vSphere Cluster.

While you can certainly get this information using the vSphere UI, you can also get this detailed information by using the vLCM REST API, which can easily be consumed using variety of vSphere SDK Clients including PowerCLI.

For inventory and/or auditing purposes, automation is typically the answer, especially at scale. I will not bore you with the details, but I recently created the following PowerCLI function called Get-vLCMClusterImageInformation and given the name of a vLCM-enabled vSphere Cluster, it will provide you with the associated ESXi base image and all Solutions and Components that is associated with a given image.

UPDATE (02/06/25) - The script has also been updated to also include information for a vLCM image that has integrated with an Hardware Support Manager (HSM) to provide firmware information.

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Preserving VM snapshot hierarchy across vCenter Servers

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On occasion, you might find yourself needing to take multi-level VM snapshots for various testing or development purposes, not an uncommon task for IT administrators.

In the past, if you needed to move the VM and preserve its snapshot hierarchy, it was usually difficult and involved manual tasks to unregister the VM and copying its files to the destination environment.


At VMware Explore last year, I had a customer who shared a nice tidbit regarding this topic with me that I was recently reminded of. By performing a Cross vCenter vMotion (not clone), the VM snapshot hierarchy is automatically preserved.

You of course can use the vSphere API and PowerCLI to initiate a Cross vCenter vMotion OR you can easily perform this operation by using the Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion capability that is built right into the vSphere UI, which can also be useful if you need to quickly cold migrate some workloads from older vSphere releases.

After authenticating into my source vCenter Server which is running vSphere 7.0 Update 3o, I simply select my VM with snapshots and perform a migration (not clone) and in a few minutes, it is now running in my vSphere 8.0 Update 2 destination vCenter Server!