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Instant Clone Microsoft Windows & VM Keystroke VMworld demo and code posted

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Apologies for the delay in getting my VMworld 2018 demo and code posted online, I know a number of you have been asking about the Windows Instant Clone samples to get an idea on how to create your own customization scripts for managing more "recent" Microsoft Windows releases 😉 and perhaps you might even consider submitting a pull request to share with the community. I have posted both the videos and code samples below. Enjoy and happy Automating!

Instant Clone Microsoft Windows

To demonstrate the power of the newly re-architected Instant Clone feature in vSphere 6.7 and to help make the point clear that the Instant Clone feature is really Guest Operating System agnostic, meaning you can Instant Clone any to Virtual Machine that can run VMware Tools, I thought it would be fun to see how old of a Microsoft OS that I could Instant Clone. After a bit of trial/error, that turned out to be Windows 98 and Windows 2000 🙂

Windows 98 Demo


Windows 2000 Demo


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Managing Distributed Firewall Rules in VMC using PowerShell & NSX-T Policy API

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Back in November 2018, VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) SDDC 1.5 Patch 1 was released and it was one of the most highly anticipated release by our customers. Although this was a "patch" release, it included a ton of new features and also brought the full power of the NSX-T platform to VMC as a generally available feature!

With NSX-T, customers also now have access to the highly requested Distributed Firewall (DFW) capability which enables granular control over East-West traffic between application workloads. In addition to enabling micro-segmentation in VMC, customers can now easily manage DFW rules using a number of grouping constructs (Tags, Virtual Machines & Conditional Statements) to create dynamic policies which follow their workloads.


Customers can configure DFW (as well as Edge Firewall) rules using the VMC Console UI but many of you have been asking for an automated method, especially if you need to create a large number of policies for more than a couple of workloads. After returning from the holiday, I spent the last couple of days updating my NSX-T Policy PowerShell Module which now includes basic support for managing DFW. For those of you who are new to using the NSX-T Policy API and PowerCLI, be sure to give these two articles a read here and here before proceeding further.

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Supermicro Home Lab Group Buy

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Happy New Years everyone! I was supposed to get this out right before the holidays but #babylam got really sick and I had to put this on hold.

Back in November I threw out an idea on Twitter to see if the #vCommunity would be interested in doing a group buy for some Supermicro kits, especially for those looking to upgrade their personal home labs to take advantage of all the new VMware goodies such as vSAN, NSX and PKS for example.

Within minutes, I had several dozen replies and it was clear that folks were definitely interested in refreshing their lab, especially with a smaller and more modern platform. Over the last few weeks, I have been working with MITXPC (who I have worked with before) on putting together some packages that would appeal to the majority of the community. Initially, I was thinking about three options: system-only (no memory/storage), system with memory (no storage) and system with memory and storage. To be clear, system means complete chassis with CPU and motherboard included. Please see the product links below for more details. 

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with MITXPC nor am I receiving any referral bonus/compensation for the discounts listed below.

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