For troubleshooting purposes, users may need to access the ESXi Direct Console User Interface (DCUI), either remotely through an out-of-band system like an iDRAC or iLO, or directly from the physical server.
For auditing purposes, all login methods to ESXi (SSH, API, Host Client, and DCUI) are recorded, and a corresponding vSphere Event called UserLoginSessionEvent is generated for easy filtering.
VCF Operations has long supported the ingestion of custom metrics and data through custom management packs, typically created by 3rd party vendors. While users can build their own custom management packs, it was a non-starter for many due to the development background required.
The newly integrated VCF Operations Management Pack Builder provides a no-code solution that can connect to any REST-based API endpoint, making it trivial to bring in custom metrics and associating that with existing or new objects within VCF Operations.
My recent purchase of a Kasa Smart Plug for energy monitoring gave me the perfect opportunity to use the VCF Operations Management Pack Builder!
Long story short, Kasa does not provide any public APIs to access their smart devices, but the open-source community has reversed engineer their protocol and built a python library called python-kasa allowing users to interact with their Kasa smart devices.
The vSAN Cluster Shutdown capability has been around since vSAN 7 Update 3 and has been enhanced over the years, most recently with the introduction of a vSAN Cluster Shutdown Wizard as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 release.
For those looking to automate the shutdown of their vSAN Cluster, we have a number of PowerCLI cmdlets: Get-VsanClusterPowerState, Start-VsanCluster and Stop-VsanCluster that simplifies this process in addition to the new UI interface, all leveraging the vSAN Management APIs.
Before the vSAN Cluster can initiate the shutdown workflow, it needs to make sure all VMs (excluding the vCenter Server VM that is managing the vSAN Cluster) has been powered off. For large environments, it can take some time to power off all VMs, which means you might need to poll or wait before running the Stop-VsanCluster cmdlet.
Instead of having to write additional code to wait for all your VMs to shutdown, you can leverage one of the vSAN Health Check Perspectives that will conveniently let you know when the vSAN Cluster is ready to be shutdown.