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How to forcefully disconnect a vSphere VM Console session?

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The vSphere Virtual Machine Console UI is an extremely useful interface for interacting with a VM, especially for initial configurations and/or debugging and troubleshooting purposes, such as an issue with networking. The VM console is analogous to connecting a physical keyboard and monitor to a computer, you remember the good ol' days right? 😀

Unlike the physical world, where you can only have a single person interacting with the computer, the vSphere VM Console can allow multiple users to view and interact with the VM. It is also not uncommon for customers to limit the number of simultaneous VM Console sessions, especially for security and/or for privacy purposes.


One potential down side with limiting the VM Console session to one is that another user may not be able to connect until the other session has concluded and/or has expired due to lack of activity. This recently came up as a question from a customer asking if there was a way to forcefully disconnect an existing VM Console connection?

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USB Network Native Driver now supports ESXi 7.0 Update 1

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I know many of you have been asking about this and today I am happy to share that the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling is now supported with ESXi hosts running the latest 7.0 Update 1 release.

Note: The USB Network Native Driver is only supported with x86 ESXi and NOT with the ESXi-Arm Fling, there seems to be some confusion since these are two different CPU architectures.

In addition, there are a couple of minor enhancements (see changelog for details), but one feature that I am super excited to see incorporated into this version of the Fling is the automatic persistency of USB NIC binding, which maps physical USB NICs to either a Standard or Distributed Virtual Switch. Previously, this required users to update the local.sh script on ESXi to automatically restore the NIC bindings since the processing of these interfaces happens much later in the boot up process. These tweaks are no longer required when using this version of the Fling!

This enhancement was the direct result from Andrei Warkentin and his work on the ESXi-Arm Fling with the Raspberry Pi! Huge thanks to him for this contribution and hopefully we can repay that back one day with the integration of the USB Network Native Driver into the ESXi-Arm Fling 😉

Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script

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After sharing a sneak peak of my updated vSphere with Tanzu Automated Lab Deployment script on Twitter, I have been receiving non-stop requests on when the script will be available. It took a bit longer to finish off the documentation, creating the script was actually the easy part 😛

In any case, I am happy to finally share the automated script for deploying the new vSphere with Tanzu "Basic" which is included as part of vSphere 7.0 Update 1 is now available! You can find full details at the following Github repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-basic-automated-lab-deployment

In addition to the deployment instructions on the Github repo, I have also included a sample walkthrough which includes both deploying the vSphere with Tanzu environment as well as enabling Workload Management on the vSphere Cluster, which is not part of the automated deployment script.

I will also be updating my existing Workload Management PowerCLI Module to incorporate the new requirements for automating the enablement of Workload Management for a vSphere with Tanzu Basic Cluster. Together with this script, you will now have the ability to deploy vSphere with Tanzu end-to-end in under 1hr time!

More details will be shared in a later blog post and I hope folks enjoy the script, it was a ton of work!