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Deployment models for vSphere Content Library

12.01.2017 by William Lam // 7 Comments

When talking to customers about vSphere Content Library deployments, one question I normally get is how best deploy Content Library for optimal workload deployment, especially in scenarios where remote or branch offices are involved? There are two main deployment models for vSphere Content Library as the title has alluded to. The main difference between the two is whether you have a single vCenter Server or if you have multiple vCenter Servers, with each managing its own vSphere infrastructure?

Lets refer to the single vCenter Server case as Scenario 1 and the multi-vCenter Server case as Scenario 2 and below are the two scenarios outlined with additional details.

Scenario 1 (Single vCenter Server):

In this scenario, which is a fairly common deployment for many smaller to mid-size organizations, where you only have a single or very few vCenter Server(s). They are used to manage several remote locations which only consists of ESXi hosts running at each of the locations and storage local to the site is available. In addition, there are several expected behaviors of the content itself which I have formulated into the following table below:

Content Management Content Distribution Content Deployment
Centrally Managed Sync across the WAN Workloads stored and deployed locally

For this type of an environment, you would first setup a published library which stores all the content that you wish to distribute across your remote sites. Next, you would create subscriber library(s) consuming the published library, but instead of storing the replicated content locally, it is actually stored at each of the remote locations and their respective vSphere Datastore(s). This ensures that content is synchronized from our published library out to each of the remote locations, but when content is requested for deployment, the traffic is local to the site rather than going across the WAN.


In the above scenario, since there is only a single vCenter Server, if it ever becomes unavailable then provisioning and management to the remote location will also be unavailable. This is the expected behavior regardless if Content Library is configured.

[Read more...]

Categories // vSphere, vSphere 6.0, vSphere 6.5 Tags // content library, vSphere 6.0, vSphere 6.5

When to use Move-VM cmdlet vs xMove.ps1 script for performing Cross vCenter vMotions?

10.26.2017 by William Lam // 11 Comments

Since publishing my Automating Cross vCenter vMotion between the same and different SSO Domain article back in early 2016, I have had a large number of customers reach out to me and share their success stories of allowing them to perform datacenter migrations to consolidating vCenter Servers all due to this awesome capability that was introduced in vSphere 6.0. In fact, many of the VM migration numbers were in the 4,000 to 8,000+ range which completely blew me away. It was great to hear from customers on how the xMoveVM.ps1 script had enabled them to do things that was simply not possible before, especially without impacting their workloads.

I still get pinged on a regular basis from customers about using my script and one thing that surprises many customers when I mention to them that this functionality has already been ported over to the native Move-VM cmdlet that was introduced with the PowerCLI 6.5 release. This had always been my original intention to provide an example using our vSphere API and enabling our customers in the short term and working with Alan Renouf and the PowerCLI team to get this folded back into the official PowerCLI cmdlets. This means, you no longer have to use my script for basic Cross vCenter vMotions whether that is between the same or different SSO Domain, which is quite nice as the number of user inputs is significantly reduced by using Move-VM cmdlet.

UPDATE (01/01/2018) - One additional option is the recently released Cross vCenter vMotion Utility Fling. For more details, please have a look at the blog post here.

Lets take a look at an example below where I have a VM called TestVM-1 which is residing in vcenter65-1 and I want to vMotion it to vcenter65-3:


With just 5 simple and easy to read lines of PowerCLI, you can perform this operation:

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, PowerCLI, vSphere Tags // Cross vMotion, ExVC-vMotion, Move-VM, PowerCLI, vSphere 6.0, vSphere 6.5, vSphere API, xVC-vMotion

Tip from Engineering - Use UEFI firmware for Windows 10 & Server 2016

10.20.2017 by William Lam // 15 Comments

Several weeks back I was chatting with a few of our Engineers from the Core Platform Team (vSphere) and they had shared an interesting tidbit which I thought I was worth mentioning to my readers. When creating a Virtual Machine in either vSphere or Fusion/Workstation, customers have the option to override the default and specify the specific Firmware boot option whether that is BIOS or UEFI.


Like most customers, I do not even bother touching this setting and I just assume the system defaults are sufficient. Interestingly, for Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, there are some important implications to be aware of on whether BIOS or UEFI is used. This is especially important since the default firmware type in vSphere for these OSes are BIOS.

UPDATE (01/07/21) - As of vSphere 6.7 Update 3, the default firmware for creating a Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 guest OS is now EFI

[Read more...]

Categories // Fusion, Security, vSphere 6.5, Workstation Tags // Credential Guard, Device Guard, fusion, Secure Boot, UEFI, vSphere 6.5, windows 10, windows 2016

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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