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Direct playback & download URLs for VMworld EU 2016 sessions

11.01.2016 by William Lam // 5 Comments

I had several folks ping me on when I would be publishing a nice consolidated list of VMworld Europe 2016 breakout sessions like I did for VMworld US. I took a look at the VMworld EU site last night and it looks like only 71 sessions have been published so far. In any case, I worked a bit of magic and was able to generate a list of playback URLs for the published session thus far. You can find the list on my Github repo: https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-eu-session-urls

UPDATED (11/01/16) - Just updated Github repo to include direct download URLs, grab them while you can 😀

Note: Similiar to the VMworld US based sessions, Media Site could make further changes which may render the URLs invalid or requiring additional authentication. I will try to update them as they change but so far, they seem to work without any issues 🙂

Configure new automatic Space Reclamation (VMFS UNMAP) using vSphere 6.5 APIs

10.31.2016 by William Lam // 6 Comments

Since its first introduction in vSphere 5.5, VMFS UNMAP also know as Space Reclamation for a VMFS based datastore has been a pretty popular Storage capability in vSphere. A commonly asked question from customers is when will the "automatic" capability return? Well, it looks like it is now back in the upcoming vSphere 6.5 release as blogged about here by Duncan Epping. Below is a screenshot of where you can find the setting. VMFS UNMAP is now enabled by default and you will need to have a VMFS 6 datastore to take advantage of this new feature.

For customers who wish to automate the configuration of the VMFS UNAMP capability whether that is to check the current settings or to enable/disable it, there are some new vSphere 6.5 APIs that have been introduced which differ from the previous implementations. To change the VMFS UNMAP setting, there is a new vSphere API called UpdateVmfsUnmapPriority() which accepts the UUID of a VMFS 6 datastore as well as an unmapPriority property which can either be "low" which means it is enabled or "none" which means it is disabled. To view the current VMFS UNMAP settings, there is a new property under the Datastore->Info->Vmfs object called UnmapPriority.

To demonstrate this new vSphere API, I have created two small PowerCLI functions called Get-VMFSUnmap and Set-VMFSUnmap which can be downloaded from here.

Here is an example of retrieving the current VMFS UNMAP settings:

Get-Datastore "mini-local-datastore-hdd" | Get-VMFSUnmap

Here is an example of enabling automatic VMFS UNMAP setting:

Get-Datastore "mini-local-datastore-hdd" | Set-VMFSUnmap -Enabled $true

Super easy way of getting ESXi installation date in vSphere 6.5

10.30.2016 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Sometimes it is the small updates which improves an existing feature or enhances the current user experience that I most appreciate with a new vSphere release. One area that I recently came across while working with vSphere 6.5 is just how easy it is now to retrieve the ESXi installation date which can be useful for troubleshooting or auditing purposes. This previously required you to decode the ESXi UUID which was needed to construct the originally installation date as outlined in this VMware KB 2144905 article.

With ESXi 6.5, you can now quickly retrieve the ESXi installation date simply by using this new ESXCLI command:

esxcli system stats installtime get

Note: ESXCLI can be executed either locally within the ESXi Shell or remotely using vCLI or PowerCLI.

In case that was not enough, the Engineer who added this capability was also kind enough to add a native vSphere API to also retrieve the ESXi installation date from a programmatic approach. Under the existing ImageHostConfigManager there is now a new vSphere 6.5 API called installDate() which returns the installation date in UTC format.

To demonstrate this new vSphere API, I have created a small PowerCLI function called Get-ESXInstallDate which can be downloaded from here.

Here is an example of retrieving the installation date for a specific ESXi host: