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Support for read-only VMDK in vSphere 8.0 Update 2

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vSphere 8.0 Update 2 was just announced last week at VMware Explore and it brings a lot of exciting new capabilities, check out this What's New in vSphere 8.0 Update 2 and What's New in vSAN 8.0 Update 2 blog posts for a nice summary of all the new features.

While doing some testing in my vSphere 8.0 Update 2 lab, I came to learn about a really cool feature that has been requested by customers over the years, which is the ability to configure a read-only virtual disk (VMDK). The most common use case for this feature is being able to share a single VMDK across multiple Virtual Machines and prevent any changes to the original data, a common scenario for VMware App Volumes or VMware Horizon environments.

I could also see this capability get leveraged by users as a way to distribute and install software where traditional application management systems are unavailable but still ensuring that workloads can not manipulate or modify the original files, definitely opens the door for some interesting capabilities.

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Converting VirtualBox VDI (Virtual Disk Image) to VMDK for use with ESXi 8.x

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If you are converting an Oracle VirtualBox VDI (Virtual Disk Image) to a VMDK for use with VMware ESXi, you might come across the following error:

Unsupported or invalid disk type 2 for 'scsi0:0'. Ensure that the disk has been imported


The invalid disk type 2 is typically a giveaway that the VMDK was mostly likely converted to a format that is only understood by a VMware Type 2 Hypervisor (Fusion/Workstation/Player) rather than ESXi which is a VMware Type 1 bare-metal Hypervisor.

Luckily, there is a straight forward way to convert the existing VMDK into the format that ESXi understands!

Note: While VirtualBox does offer an export appliance option which produces an OVA (Open Virtualization Archive), it fails to properly import into a VMware environment 🙁 and hence the need to work directly with the VDI images.

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Auditing vSphere Datastore activities (Download, Upload, Copy, Move, Rename and Delete)

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What feels like a weekly response, vCenter Server Events, should always be your initial starting point in helping you understand the Who, What and When for something occurring within your vSphere environment. There are over 2K+ events that are published out of the box from vCenter Server with hundreds more from 2nd and 3rd party solutions that integrate with vCenter Server.

Combine vCenter Server Events with the power of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA), you now have a powerful Event-Driven Automation solution that can solve literally a limitless number of use cases, many of which have been shared by existing users found in this document HERE.

Today, I had received a question about auditing customers vSphere Datastore activities and identifying when someone has manually downloaded a Virtual Machine Virtual Disk (VMDK)?

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