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Auditing vGPU Profile Reconfigurations in vSphere

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vCenter Server Events are extremely powerful and contains a ton of useful information, especially for auditing and compliance purposes. As of vSphere 8.0 Update 3, there are over 2.1K+ out of the box events with many more through 2nd and 3rd party integrations.

One of my favorite vCenter Server Event is the VmReconfiguredEvent as it provides complete visibility into every VM reconfiguration change as shared in this blog post back in 2015.

I recently saw an interesting inquiry about being able to audit and track vGPU profile reconfigurations for a VM and of course, vCenter Server Events to the rescue!

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VM snapshot retention-based removal in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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VM snapshots are an extremely useful feature in vSphere but they can also be miss-used and retained for much longer than they should, sometimes weeks, months and even years! Sadly, having a forgotten VM snapshot for a year or longer is not actually as rare as you might expect and I have definitely heard some interesting stories from our field and customers.

While cleaning up a recent VM snapshot, I noticed a new option in the delete all snapshot workflow that now allow users to specify the age of the snapshot to remove which is a new feature in the latest release of vSphere 8.0 Update 3.


This makes it easy for administrators to quickly delete old snapshots without having to write any automation, which is typically how most users manage snapshot retention period including an event-driven approach using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution.

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Quick Tip - Verifying vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Backup Status

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I recently found out that my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) scheduled backups had been failing for some time but I was not aware. While there is a default vCenter Server alarm for failed VCSA backups, however it is only visible when you have selected the vCenter Server inventory object in left hand navigation, which is not a typical item that I select as shown in the screenshot below.


Furthermore, I was actually logged into the VCSA's VMware Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) not too long ago while updating to a newer patch release and I had checked to see if backups were successful, which I thought they were when looking at the "Status" column.


It was not until I took a closer look, did I realize that the schedule backup activity log is ordered from oldest to newest, meaning what I saw was a backup that has happend a long time ago and not necessary the latest backup attempt. I found this to be a really strange UX since as you would need to page to very end to check whether the latest backups were succssful or not.

Note: I have already filed an internal bug to ask for the VCSA schedule backup activity to be ordered from newest to oldest, so users can quickly see if the latest backups are successful or not.

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