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PowerCLI module for Proactive HA (including simulation)

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Proactive HA is a very cool new feature that was introduced in vSphere 6.5, which enables our hardware vendors to communicate their hardware specific health information directly into vSphere and specifically with vSphere DRS. This hardware health information can then be leveraged by vSphere DRS to take proactive actions to guard against potential hardware failures. Brian Graf, Product Manager for Proactive HA, DRS and overall vSphere Availability has a nice blog post here where he goes into more details on how Proactive HA works.

As Brian mentioned, a few of our select hardware vendors are already in the process of developing and certifying Proactive HA integrations for vSphere, so stay tuned for those announcements in the future by both VMware and our partners. In the meantime, there was an interesting comment from one of our field folks asking whether it would be possible to "simulate" the new Quarantine Mode operation for an ESXi host to be better understand how this feature might work?

Quarantine Mode is new mode for ESXi, which can only be triggered by Proactive HA. It functions similar to the Maintenance Mode operation, but instead of migrating all VMs off, it will allow existing VMs to continue to run but prevent additional new VMs to be placed on the host.

Proactive HA does provide a set of public vSphere APIs under the healthUpdateManager which is primarily targeted at our hardware vendors to consume. However, these APIs could also be used by our customers to get visibility into the current Proactive HA configuration as well as the health of the ESXi hosts from the Proactive HA provider standpoint. Going back to our initial question, it is possible to "register" a fake Proactive HA provider and manually generate health updates to simulate what a real Proactive HA solution could look like.

Disclaimer: This is for educational and lab purposes only. Creating a fake or simulated Proactive HA provider is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk. The creation of Proactive HA providers as well as publishing health updates is for our hardware vendors to consume which in turn will provide native integrations that include customer visible interfaces within the vSphere Web Client.

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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 9

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In Part 9, we were initially going to cover the new backup and restore capability that was introduced in vSphere 6.5 for the VCSA. However, it looks like Brian Graf has already created an awesome PowerCLI module (Backup-VCSA.psm1) that can be used to backup the VCSA, which you can find more details here.

While going through the VAMI APIs for the backup feature, I did notice there was one interesting backup VAMI API that Brian may not have looked at, at least I did not see a function consuming this API. Prior to initiating a backup for either a VCSA or PSC, you can query the expected size of the backup. This information can be pretty helpful beyond just for backups, but understanding the size of your system at any point in time.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

The backup and restore feature for the VCSA is located in the VAMI UI, but there is not a UI for retrieving the current expected backup size.

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/recovery/backup/parts

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output

The output is pretty straight forward, it provides the total expected backup size (MB) as well as the breakdown of the total size into "configuration" data and the "Stats, Events, Alarms and Tasks" (SEAT) data.


With this new API, you can now easily see how large your vCenter Server Database is and take appropriate action such as truncating the data or reducing the retention period which can especially help with the performance of vCenter Server as well as the time it takes during upgrades.

Virtual Hardware Plug-N-Play improvements in vSphere 6.5

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Have you ever noticed when you create a new VM, a floppy device is present in the GuestOS regardless if you had actually added one or not? If not, it is pretty simple to demonstrate. Create any Windows VM using a non-vSphere 6.5 release, install the OS and then power it on. You should now see a floppy device (A:) show up under "My Computer" as seen in the screenshot below.


Although this may look like a strange behavior (more on this in a bit), it is completely harmless as there is no real floppy device being presented to the VM. For many customers, this behavior was either unnoticed or it was just ignored as it did not bother them. However, there is a concern for some customers who must prove that the virtual hardware seen from the GuestOS matches the virtual hardware presented to the VM, usually for compliance purposes. To prevent a floppy device from showing up, you can edit the BIOS, but this generally does not scale as it must be done manually (no APIs exists) and even some of the BIOS editing utilities are fairly limited in their capabilities.

So why does this happen and how does vSphere 6.5 help?

In talking to one of our Principal Engineers about this topic, as this question comes up from time to time about disabling floppy devices in the BIOS. I came to learn more about the behavior described above and the nice enhancement that was introduced in vSphere 6.5 for Virtual Hardware Plug-N-Play.

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