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Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG)

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The Broadcom Compatibility Guide (formerly VMware Compatibility Guide) is where users would go to check hardware (new or existing) compatibility with VMware software.


There are a number of different compatibility guides that you can search through from CPU processors to servers to the various of I/O devices including accelerators and graphics cards. For users with a small number of hardware devices, search is pretty straight forward but if you have a variety of different hardware to check, the web interface may not be the quickest.

One thing that I was pleasantly surprised to learn was that the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) could easily be consumed programmatically, unlike the previous VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) which had a different backend system.

While there is not an official BCG API, which would include documentation, support and backwards compatibility, users can interact with the BCG using the same API as the BCG web interface.

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Enable TRIM/UNMAP from Nested vSAN OSA/ESA to physical vSAN OSA

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If you are running Nested vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) or vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) workloads on top of a physical vSAN OSA setup, you may want to enable the Guest TRIM/UNAMP capability, which would allow your the "inner" (Nested) workloads to pass the TRIM/UNMAP requests down into your physical vSAN OSA deployment for space reclamation.

It was recently observed that storage utilization may continue to increase on a physical vSAN OSA setup even when the Nested vSAN ESA/OSA workloads have already freed up their storage, which is due to the fact that the TRIM/UNAMP commands are not being passed down into the physical vSAN OSA. If you are using vSAN ESA for your physical setup, Guest TRIM/UNMAP is already enabled by default, so this is only applicable if you are using vSAN OSA.

To enable the Guest TRIM/UNMAP capability, you need apply the following ESXi Advanced Setting to your physical vSAN OSA.

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Enhancements to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) & vSphere Automated Lab Deployment Scripts

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Simplicity is something I try to strive for when creating automation, whether that is for myself or for our customers. When I develop a script, I try to keep everything within a single file, so that it is easy to share and consume. As a script increases in functionality, it may be useful to break out some of its functions, typically libraries or modules.

I was recently debugging an issue with my popular automated lab deployment script for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and while looking through the script that the user had been using, I found numerous variables that were commented out and replaced with their own values, which looked like they had different configuration and environments where they were using this single script.

It then hit me, why have I not considered externalizing all the variables that the script relied on, such that a user could easily supply different configuration options without needing to edit the primary deployment script!? 😅

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