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Cross vCenter vMotion workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0

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While vSphere 7.0 officially reached end of support in October 2025, many organizations continue to operate on it, often not by choice, and on hardware that is likely end of life.

An established transition strategy among enterprises is to migrate workloads into a newly deployed environment using the battle tested vSphere vMotion capability.

A lesser known capability introduced with both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 allows non-disruptive migration of workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0, as the minimum supported version of the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is 7.0 as you can see from VDS creation workflow wizard.


Users currently have two supported methods for migrating workloads from their existing vSphere 7.0 environment into either a VVF or VCF 9.0 deployment using the native Cross vCenter vMotion capability.

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Modern Kubernetes Visualization using Radar

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Over the years, many graphical user interfaces have appeared for Kubernetes, but only a few continue to be actively maintained and developed. While I prefer the standard kubectl CLI for basic interactions with a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster, a visual representation can be extremely helpful for troubleshooting and debugging.

Headlamp was my go to UI tool for k8s, which provides a simliar user experience to many of the previous Kubernetes visualization tools, nothing fancy but it gets the job done.

I recently discovered another OSS Kubernetes visualization tool called Radar, which aims to fill some of the gaps left by existing tools on the market. I was a bit skeptical as this could just be another "modern" tool until the next one is built, but I figured I would give it a try!


At first glance, it has a much cleaner, modern look and feel after I connected it to my vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) cluster. The homepage provides a summary of all the expected datapoints including versioning, resource utilization, deployment details, and the health of components and workloads.

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Bypassing the ESX Tunnel Endpoint (TEP) 1600 MTU Check in the VCF Installer

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Before deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 environment, the VCF Installer performs a number of validations including network MTU. The minimum MTU that is required to deploy VCF is 1600, which is used for the Tunnel Endpoint (TEP) for NSX traffic between your ESX hosts.

For most environments, this is not an issue and users will typically deploy VCF with Jumbo Frames enabled and configure the MTU with value of 9000. If your environment does not meet the minimum MTU requirement, the VCF Installer will flag this as an error and prevent you from deploying as shown in the screenshot below.


If you can not meet the MTU requirement, you can bypass the validation check so that you can continue with your deployment of the VCF Management Domain.

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