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Removable drive tray accessory for Supermicro SYS-E302-12x fanless chassis

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For those in the market for a small form factor (SFF) Supermicro kit, you might be interested in a new removable drive tray accessory that I was just made aware by the Supermicro team. This new removal drive tray is only compatible with the new Supermicro SYS-E302-12x fanless chassis, which is the foundational chassis for a number of recent offerings from Supermicro including:

Note: I also wrote about the SYS-E302-12D last year, which you can read the full review HERE.

Here are a few pictures that was provided to me by Supermicro on what the drive tray looks like both from the side and top:

The drive tray will support both a 7mm or 8.5mm drive and will be one of the accessories that you can either purchase directly from Supermicro or one of their many authorized resellers.


The drive tray also reminded me of the removable M.2 NVMe to PCIed enclosure by Icy Dock in case you have a kit that supports full PCIe slot which is quite nice for hot-plug/remove capabilities.

Retrieving and translating CPUID features for a vSphere VM

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Whether you are using the classic Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) on a vSphere Cluster or the new Per-VM EVC capability, the usable (user-level) CPU features from an ESXi host are then presented down into a Virtual Machine for consumption.

If you wanted to see what which CPU features are exposed for a particular VM or even custom CPU compatibility mask which hides certain CPU features, you can do so by using the vSphere API and accessing either the FeatureRequirement or FeatureMask properties, depending if Per-VM EVC is configured or not. The results from the vSphere API is a list of CPUID strings that may or may not be easy to translate to the friendly CPU processor feature name.

While doing some testing, I noticed that for VMs configured with Per-VM EVC, rather than listing out the CPUID strings, it actually lists the friendly CPU processor feature name.


I was not able to find any CPUID translator using the EvcManager API, but the vSphere UI must be getting this information somehow, right? After a bit of poking around in my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), I realized how this translation was occurring ...

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Quick Tip - Certificate is not trusted when importing signed OVF/OVA into vCenter Server

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An OVF/OVA can be digitally signed by a vendor to ensure its authenticity and when importing it into vCenter Server, the vSphere UI will either display that it contains a valid certificate or the certificate is not trusted as demonstrated in the example below:


If you are using a self-signed TLS certificate to sign an OVF/OVA, then it is expected that it would not be trusted by the Root Certificate Authority (CA) stored within the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).

However, if you have a valid TLS certificate that has been issued from a trusted certificate authority to sign an OVF/OVA, would you still see the error message? The answer actually surprised me.

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