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VM Creation Date now available in vSphere 6.7

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Last year, I wrote about a new Virtual Machine API property called createDate which provides customers a method of retrieving the original creation date and time of a VM. This vSphere API was first introduced in VMware Cloud on AWS and with the release of vSphere 6.7, it is also now available for on-premises customers to consume.

I know this is a feature that many customers have been asking for (including myself) and I am super happy to finally see this information automatically captured and persisted as part of the VM configuration. Customers no longer have to query the vCenter Server Events API to retrieve this information and store it externally, since it can be rotated out and basically lost due to your vCenter Server Events retention configuration. As of right now, the VM creation date is only available using the vSphere API, it is currently not available in the vSphere H5 Client and hopefully I will be able to convince PM to add this useful piece information into the UI as well!

The createDate property is located under VirtualMachine->Config and can be accessed using any one of the supported vSphere 6.7 Automation SDKs which also includes PowerCLI (you will need to install PowerCLI 10.1.0 which enables support for vSphere 6.7)

Here is an example of retrieving the createDate for a VM named esxi67-01:

(Get-VM -Name esxi67-01).ExtensionData.Config.createDate


Here are a few things to be aware of regarding the createDate behavior:

  • BOTH vCenter Server and ESXi hosts must be upgraded to 6.7 to make use of the new API
  • This API is available on both vCenter Server as well as ESXi hosts running 6.7
  • Only new VMs that were created after upgrading to 6.7 will include this property with the creation date
  • VMs that were created prior to upgrading 6.7 will not have their original creation date, but rather a default value of 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z. If ESXi hosts have not been upgraded but vCenter Server has, then the API property will be unset (null)
  • You can programmatically check whether an ESXi host supports the new createDate property by querying its capabilities using the vSphere API. Here is a PowerCLI example:

    (Get-VMHost -Name 192.168.30.10).ExtensionData.Capability.VmCreateDateSupported

  • VMs created in a vSphere 6.7 environment can be Cross vCenter vMotion to other non-vSphere 6.7 environments and migrated back while retaining its original createDate value. This is done so by storing the value in the extraConfig property of a VM (this is best effort support and we recommend only migrating to vSphere 6.7 or newer environments)

Configuring Active Directory integration with VMware PKS Ops Manager using VMware Identity Manager (vIDM)

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When configuring Ops Manager for VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) from an Authentication standpoint, you can either chose local authentication or use an external identity provider. The former means you are managing local users that reside within the User Account and Authentication (UAA) component of Ops Manager, which may be okay for a lab or proof of concept environment. However, for a Production deployment, most customers prefer to use their enterprise directory services which is typically Microsoft Active Directory.

Ops Manager can integrate with a number of external identity providers as long as it can speak SAML. For VMware customers, the preferred identity provider solution is VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) which not only supports Active Directory, but can also support a number of other directory service integrations like Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) as example. Since vIDM supports SAML-based authentication, we can configure Ops Manager to use vIDM which also means we benefit from all of the enterprise Single Sign-On capabilities that vIDM delivers, including things like multi-factor authentication which can provide an additional layer of security when connecting to your PKS infrastructure.

Since there is currently no documentation on how to set this up, with the help of my colleague Blair Fritz and Assaf from the vIDM Engineering team, we have documented the process below which outline the required steps to integrate Ops Manager with vIDM.

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Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 9: Logging

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In this blog post, we will walk through configuring the various components within a PKS deployment such as vSphere (vCenter Server & ESXi), NSX-T (Manager, Controllers & Edges), BOSH and PKS Control Plane to forward their logs to an external syslog system such as a VMware vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) which includes 25 free OSI licenses for any vSphere customer.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

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