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Inventory standalone ESXi host core count for vSphere+

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To help customers inventory their existing vSphere and vSAN CPU core usage for the vSphere+ and vSAN+ Cloud Service, you can take advantage of this inventory script HERE that I have created and generates a report (including CSV) by connecting to your existing vCenter Server(s) for analysis.

While the majority of our customers use vCenter Server to manage their ESXi host(s), we do have customers that run standalone ESXi hosts for various reasons. Recently, I had a few inquires on how customers could inventory their standalone ESXi hosts as they plan to transition those standalone ESXi hosts into the vSphere+ Cloud Service?

The benefit of using the vSphere API in creating the initial script is that the exact same API model also applies to a standalone ESXi host, so the core logic was there but a small modification of the script was required as we now have individual ESXi hosts that we need to connect and inventory. In addition, I also wanted to make the user experience as easy as possible to run the script and require as little input as possible.

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Extending ESXCLI commands

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Back on the first of April, I had shared the following video:


While many thought it was an April Fools's joke, that was certainly the original intention, but I also wanted the joke to be based on something realistic and not made up. Everything that you saw in that video is completely real, this was a real ESXCLI command that integrated with ChatGPT and was running on an ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release! 😊

So how did I do it?

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Finding vCenter Cloud Gateway Deployments in your environment

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After publishing my recent article on how to audit vCenter Cloud Gateway and vCenter Server registrations for the vSphere+ Cloud Service, I thought it would also be useful to share some tips on how you can easily find your existing vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) deployment(s) within your environment?

You might wonder, do I not already know about my VCGW deployment(s) or for that matter any other solution that is deployed within my own infrastructure? Yes, that would ideally be the case and you should also be able to look that up in your change management database (CMDB). However, over the years in speaking to many customers and hearing about some of the requests from our field teams, I have come to learn that this nirvana state does not exist for many of our customers.

In some organizations, it has been described as the wild wild west where teams of administrators with access to their vSphere environment can deploy any number of solution without ever communicating amongst each other to organizations that provide shared infrastructure access to other small teams and/or companies with a simliar set of challenges. Net net, it is certainly possible that solutions like the VCGW gateway may have been deployed or potentially even retired but have not been removed from your environment.

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