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First look at Project Keswick

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VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO) was announced at VMware Explore US last week and one of the components that it is built on is using something called Project Keswick.

In fact, at VMware Explore, Project Keswick was officially launched and is now available for customers to try out! I was fortunate enough to attend the Project Keswick technical deep dive session in person, but if you were not able to make the session or you were not at VMware Explore, the session recording is already available online for free to watch #VIB2169LV Scaling and Deploying ESXi at the Edge with Desired State Management and GitOps.

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On-Demand session URLs for VMware Explore US 2023

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VMware Explore 2023 has officially concluded! Thank you to all the customers, partners and colleagues that I had a chance to connect with during the conference. While I was not able to attend as many breakout sessions as I had planned, all sessions are recorded and are available in VMware Explore Video Library for 2023.

Just like in past years, I have put together a small Github page that simply summarize all VMware Explore US 2023 breakout sessions by their Category, Session Code, Session Name, On-demand URL, Presentation, Views and Session Speakers. This should make it very easier to search for a specific session, topic or speaker and jump straight to the VMware Explore on-demand link, which will require a VMware Explore account to view the session. There are no offline viewing options, you must login to view the content from the VMware Explore site.

UPDATE (11/09/23) - The initial sessions for Explore Barcelona have just been published, as more sessions are added, I will update the repo.


You can access the repo by visiting: https://github.com/lamw/vmware-explore-2023-session-urls (short URL: https://vmwa.re/vmware-explore-2023)

How to check the number of days before ESXi password expires?

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Local user accounts created in ESXi including the root user has a default password expiration of 99999 days before administrators need to change the password. Users can control the password expiry by modifying the following ESXi Advanced Setting called Security.PasswordMaxDays which is also referenced in the ESXi Security Documentation along with other advanced configurations.

Password rotation or updates are typically managed by an organizations password management solution which is responsible keeping track and notifying when local passwords are about to expire. With that said, not everyone has a password management solution and how do you quickly check how many days left before an account password expires on an ESXi host? I initially thought this should be pretty simple to figure out, especially with utilities like chage but the version that ESXi ships is a stripped down version via Busybox and it did not provide any expiry details like the typical chage version might.

This meant, that the password expiry would need to be calculated manually and luckily, this is not a new concept. The answer lies in the /etc/shadow file which contains a number of fields that can then be used to figure out the number of days left before an account expires or if has already expired. I will not bore you with the details, but you can create the following shell script which can run in the ESXi Shell to provide you with the answer.

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