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Auditing vGPU Profile Reconfigurations in vSphere

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vCenter Server Events are extremely powerful and contains a ton of useful information, especially for auditing and compliance purposes. As of vSphere 8.0 Update 3, there are over 2.1K+ out of the box events with many more through 2nd and 3rd party integrations.

One of my favorite vCenter Server Event is the VmReconfiguredEvent as it provides complete visibility into every VM reconfiguration change as shared in this blog post back in 2015.

I recently saw an interesting inquiry about being able to audit and track vGPU profile reconfigurations for a VM and of course, vCenter Server Events to the rescue!

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Easily audit ESXi boot options programmatically in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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ESXi (kernel) boot options can be added during ESXi boot up (by pressing SHIFT+O) or by updating the ESXi boot.cfg configuration to influence specific configurations and/or behaviors.

In the past, it was difficult to get visibility across your fleet of ESXi hosts on which hosts might be using custom boot options, especially in cases where you might not need them anymore or worse if someone has manually added a configuration that you did not intend.

In vSphere 8.0 Update 3, a new bootCommandLine property has been added to the vSphere API and can now provide full visibility into all boot options used for a given ESXi host.

PowerCLI 13.3 had also GA'ed yesterday, which supports latest APIs introduced in both vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2  and you can easily access this new property by running the following command:

(Get-VMHost).ExtensionData.Hardware.SystemInfo

Quick Tip - Disable network traffic monitoring (promiscuous) UI prompt in VMware Fusion

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While working on some demos planned for my VMware Explore session, Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation At Scale [CODEB1574LV], I kept getting this network monitoring prompt when powering up my Nested ESXi VM running in VMware Fusion.


Since Nested ESXi requires the use of promiscuous mode (for inner-VM networking), you will be prompted to approve of the request or networking will be disabled. For demo purposes, you probably do not want this prompting and I was wondering if this could be disabled. After a quick ping in our internal VMware Hosted Google Space, I learned that we can disable the UI prompt by adding a VMX option to the VM.

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