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Frequently asked scenarios about vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+

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This is a multi-part blog series on some of the frequently asked questions and scenarios for the vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ Cloud Services. What started out as a single blog post that attempted to summarize some of the learnings and notes that I have made while answering various questions from our field and customers for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ quickly turned into a 3K+ word blog post and counting! ?

While I thought it would be easier from a search perspective to have everything in a single blog post, I decided to take the advice from the community and actually break it up into small blogs which would be part of a large multi-part blog series, in no particular order but I recommend reading it in the following logical order as shown below:

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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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Custom vCenter Server Role using vSphere Terraform Provider on VMware Cloud on AWS

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In a VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A) environment, a default CloudAdmin vCenter Server Role is provided to customers to manage and deploy workloads in vCenter Server. Typically, this vCenter Server Role is only granted to limited number of Cloud Administrators within your organization, which you get to control as an end user.

VMware also supports customers in creating additional custom vCenter Server Roles that limits the privileges for other usage such as auditing or workload provisioning. If you create a custom vCenter Server Role for VM provisioning and you are using vSphere Automation Tools that VMware supports including PowerCLI or even the popular vSphere Terraform Provider, you may come across the following error message during the VM deployment:

System.Read privilege required for config.distributedVirtualSwitch


As you can see from the error message, the current user does not have the Read-only privilege assigned to the Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS) which is required by the automation client, in this case the vSphere Terraform Provider, to be able to properly provisioned a VM.

Note: When using the default CloudAdmin role, VMware automatically applies the correct privileges to all applicable vSphere Inventory objects and this is the reason you do not see this problem when using an account with the default CloudAdmin role. For custom vCenter Server Roles that are created by customers, we can not apply this automation as the intention of the custom role(s) are unknown to VMware.

We can quickly fix this issue by following the instructions below which will guide you in properly assigning the correct vSphere permissions to enable VM provisioning when using a non-CloudAdmin role.

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