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Automating the new VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) User Notification Preferences

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Last week the VMware Cloud team released one of the highly requested feature which is the ability to control notification preferences for an individual user, which is provided as part of the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) service. Users can now login to the VMware Cloud Console (VMC UI) and on left hand side, you should now see a new Notification Preferences tab which will allow you to specify which notifications you wish to receive via the Email channel.


As of writing this blog post, there is currently over 200+ notifications that can be configured which are broken up across the following four categories:

  • Elastic DRS (7)
  • Organization General (128)
  • SDDC Maintenance (61)
  • VMware Site Recovery Service (23)

Today, the notification preferences is configured on a per-use basis and by default, users are automatically subscribed to all notifications. The ability to customize is great but with over 200+ notifications to select or de-select from, this could be a difficult task, especially with a large number of users who may or may not understand each and ever single notification type. This is certainly an area the VMware Cloud team will be looking to enhance in the future to make it even easier to consume and customize.

In the mean time, to help with making this customization change easier within your organization, we can also take advantage of the new NGW Notification Preferences API. What better way to demonstrate this than incorporating this into my VMware Cloud Notification Gateway Community PowerShell Module, which is also available for consumption within the PowerShell Gallery.

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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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Can you really deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) without DNS and NTP?

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The simple answer is Yes. Now, you might be wondering why anyone would want to put themselves through the pain without setting up proper DNS and NTP?

Well, not all environments have the luxury of having either outbound connectivity and/or access to basic infrastructure services like DNS and NTP. This may come as a surprise to some, but there are customers out there that need to operate in very unique and constrained environments. One such example of this is typically from customers that need to deploy vSphere in a "dark site" where local infrastructure services like DNS and NTP are not available.


I recently re-validated this deployment model using the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release running on an Intel NUC 11 which had no outbound connectivity and it was only connected to my laptop, which also had no outbound connectivity or access to DNS or NTP. Since this question recently came up from a customer who was looking to automate this, so I ran through the deployment workflow using the VCSA CLI Installer but this should also be possible with VCSA UI Installer as the same options are supported.

OK, so how do you make this work?

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