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01.02.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Happy New Year! 🥳

I wanted to kick off the new year with something that I had shared at the end of 2022, which was a break down on the number of blog posts that I have published over the years.

Since @rhjensen was asking about number of blog posts compared to previous years ....

With some quick PowerShell Automation, here's all my blog post breakdown from 2010-2022 along with the sum, minimum, maximum and average. Sounds like 2015 was an interesting year 😁 pic.twitter.com/WIt2KZ34Qa

— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) December 16, 2022

A number of folks had reached out asking how they could do the same for their own blogs and so I wanted to share the solution that I had used.

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ESXi Advanced & Kernel Settings Reference

12.13.2022 by William Lam // 3 Comments

Every time I need to recall or reference a specific ESXi Advanced or Kernel Setting for a customer or field inquiry, I typically need to look at a live ESXi host to see whether a given setting is defined for that version of ESXi and also how to access and/or update the settings. Depending on the interface (vSphere API, vSphere UI, ESXCLI, etc.) that you are using, you may only be able to see a subset of these properties.

For example, some ESXi Advanced Settings are only available using the vSphere API/UI while others are available in both the vSphere API/UI and ESXCLI, with the latter being a common utility for customers to view or update these settings. Similarly, for ESXi Kernel Settings, not only are there new options that are introduced with each ESXi release, but being able to easily check the default values and minimums and maximums can also be useful. I should also mention using the vSphere API/UI, you can also accessed the ESXi Kernel Settings which are prefixed with VMkernel.

As a huge VMware Automation person, I was surprised that I had not thought about creating a reference for the ESXi Advanced and Kernel Settings for recent ESXi releases? I figure this would benefit more than just myself and I have put together the following Github repo: https://github.com/lamw/esxi-advanced-and-kernel-settings where you can see all the default ESXi Advanced and Kernel Settings for ESXi releases across 6.0, 6.5, 7.0 and 8.0.

For those interested, this was generated using some PowerCLI automation and below are the two snippets for pulling the ESXi Advanced Settings (supported and runtime values) using the vSphere API and the ESXi Kernel Settings, which I used the ESXCLI interface that is exposed through the PowerCLI Get-EsxCli cmdlet.

UPDATE (08/13/24) - vCenter Server Advanced Settings Reference is now available.

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Quick Tip - Encoding special characters for OVFTool on the command-line

12.12.2022 by William Lam // 1 Comment

If you use strong and complex passwords that contain special characters (which you should), it can some times be challenging from an automation perspective on how to properly escape these characters, which can also depend on the scripting or programming language that you are using.

Today I learned about a nice little enhancement in OVFTool 4.4 or later, which makes it easy to handle complex passwords containing special characters by supporting URL encoding for these characters. This is also great for those writing automation scripts and not having to input the password interactively but can now be added to OVFTool command-line string.

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