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Is my vSphere Cluster managed by vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) as a Desired Image or Baseline?

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Prior to vSphere 7.0, ESXi lifecycle management has been provided by vSphere Update Manager (VUM), which has been around for more than a decade plus and is most likely what you are still using today. With the release of vSphere 7.0, VMware introduced a brand new lifecycle management solution for ESXi called vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), which you can read more about HERE.


While VMware has made it clear that vLCM will be the future going forward for ESXi lifecycle management, we also understand that most customers will still be using the existing VUM-based solution and we wanted to make sure it was easy to  transition between the two solutions, especially within the vSphere UI.

An interesting question was recently brought up was how to determine whether a vSphere Cluster was using the new vLCM solution based on desired images versus VUM, which uses baselines?

Note: If you are not familiar between vLCM Desired Image and VUM Baselines, be sure to check out this helpful resource HERE.

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Interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2023

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Similiar to my post last year on interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2022, I figured it was time to put together the 2023 edition, especially with some of the kits that I have come to learn about or ones that are planned for release later this year.

The list below is not an exhaustive by any means, but I did try to look for unique kits that folks may not be aware of and/or that include interesting capabilities or designs that would support VMware ESXi without issues and be able to run various other VMware products on top like vSAN, NSX, Aria and Tanzu.

While pricing is just one of the many factors in the hardware decision process, I did limit the scope to the base kit costing sub-$2,000 USD. I also wanted to make sure that the latest ESXi releases will install and run without any issues, which is typically governed by the model of the onboard network adapter. Therefore, any system that requires an additional USB network adapter to install ESXi is automatically excluded from the list. The size and form factor is also just as important and most of the kits below take up very little space or can easily be mobile, if needed.

If there are other new kits that have been released or planned for 2023 that you feel should make the list, be sure to leave a comment below.

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Quick Tip - How to deploy vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) to legacy CPU without VMX Unrestricted Guest feature?

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I recently had a customer reach out who was having an issue deploying the latest vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 8.x to an ESXi host that had a CPU that was no longer supported. After the VCSA OVA was uploaded by the VCSA (UI/CLI) installer, it fails to power on the VM with the following error message:

The Intel "VMX Unrestricted Guest" feature is necessary to run this virtual machine on an Intel processor

This problem is only observed with older legacy CPUs that do not support some of the modern CPU instructions that is expected by most workloads today. There is workaround for those that still wish to run on unsupported hardware, which may yield other unexpected behaviors, by adding a VM Advanced Setting monitor.allowLegacyCPU = TRUE

However, there is a chicken/egg problem that user was not able to add this setting before the VM was automatically powered on by the VCSA Installer.

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