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ESXi on Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra

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After getting hands on with the Lenovo P3 Tiny, which was my first time experiencing a Lenovo kit, I was recommended by the Lenovo team to also check out its larger and more powerful sibling the Lenovo P3 Ultra.


While many of the smaller form factor systems have gotten more capable over the years, especially the classic 4x4 kits, they do have their limits in terms resources and expandability.

It has been some time since I have looked at larger kits but after glancing at the P3 Ultra specs, I can see why the Lenovo team thought this might be of interests to the VMware Community, especially with all the additional capabilities, packed into a larger but still pretty compact form factor design.

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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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