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Quick Tip - vSphere 7.0 Update 3o also supports disabling/enabling vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) in vSphere UI

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I recently shared that in vSphere 8.0 Update, you can now easily manage the vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) configuration by using either the vSphere UI or a new vSphere API, which simplifies this operation if you need to disable vCLS for a particular vSphere Cluster or if you need to remediate one by disabling and re-enabling the feature. Today, the process is less than ideal as you need to add a new vCenter Server Advanced Setting for each vSphere Cluster that you want to disable vCLS on.

For customers still on vSphere 7.x, I just found out from our vCLS Engineering team, that the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3o, which was just released less than 24 hours ago, also includes this enhancement for managing vCLS configuration (enable/disable) using the vSphere UI!


One thing to note is that the new vSphere API that was introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 2 to manage this exact same vCLS setting is not available in vSphere 7.0 Update 3o. If you wish to automate this configuration for vSphere 7.x environment, you will need to add the required vCenter Server Advanced Setting using the vSphere API.

Heads Up - New image identifier required by VM Service in vSphere 8.0 Update 2

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I have been a huge fan of the VM Service capability, which has been an integral part of vSphere with Tanzu since its inception with the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 2. The VM Service had another major update last year that enabled further customization of workloads with the Sphere 8.0 release. What makes the latest update so exciting for vSphere with Tanzu users is that in vSphere 8.0 Update 2, the VM Service now officially supports deploying Microsoft Windows VMs and can also create VMs using all the rich VM configuration options that the vSphere platform supports!

I just got to try out the new VM Service feature yesterday and deployed a Windows OVF that I had built almost a year ago, which I have waiting for this feature to finally ship! 😀


I typically save my VM Service YAML manifest files so that I can easily reuse them but after performing the kubectl apply, I noticed nothing was being deployed and when I went to retrieve more details by running:

kubectl get vm -o yaml

I noticed the following error message:

message: 'Failed to get the VM''s image: windows-desktop-10'

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How to setup private GitLab on a Synology for Project Keswick?

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My recent blog post on setting up a custom vSphere Content Library on my Synology gave me another idea that I had been thinking about regarding Project Keswick, which was announced back at VMware Explore Las Vegas.

If you have network connectivity to the Keswick Cloud Service, you can easily associate a Git repository, which is used for host configurations and workload deployments using GitOps using Github or even a privately managed Gitlab instance. For organizations that have additional compliance, security or air-gapped requirements, using the Keswick Cloud Service may not be an option. With that said, Project Keswick also supports an advanced deployment option where the association of a Git repository, such as GitLab, can also be accomplished without requiring the use of the Keswick Cloud Service.

While I have had experience using both Github as well as GitLab, which VMware uses to host its own code repository, I have actually never setup my own GitLab instance before. I thought this would be a great learning opportunity, especially with the ability to run additional add-on applications on a Synology.

After a bit of researching online, I found that GitLab can easily run as a Container workload and it just so happens that the Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) has a package for running containers creatively called Container Manager and below are the step by step instructions for setting up GitLab running on Synology DSM 7.2.

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