WilliamLam.com

vSphere ESXi 7.x will be last version to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization

by // 11 Comments

As a heads up, I just wanted to share that VMware has just published a new knowledge base article to communicate that ESXi 7.x will be the last major release to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization, which was originally introduced back in 2011 with the release of vSphere 5.0.

Last year, VMware had also published a blog outlining that they will no longer pursue hardware certification for the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1 for ESXi and as unfortunate as this is, hopefully this updated news will not come as a surprise to any of our customers or partners due to the various challenges in supporting the Apple hardware platform with ESXi.

On a more personal note, this is also a bitter sweet end, I have been writing about Apple macOS Virtualization on ESXi since its inception almost exactly 11 years ago. I came to learn about the new virtualization capability during an on-site beta for vSphere 5.0 (codenamed MN) at VMware HQ back when I was a customer. Not only did our organization have a need for this capability, but this was also the time that Apple had announced EOL'ed of Apple XServe, which was the initial hardware platform that was officially supported. I still recall emailing our leadership after the on-site to purchase as many XServe as we could before you could no longer buy the systems so that we can enable our development teams who were building both iOS and macOS applications.

It certainly has been a wild ride over the years in advocating for our users and their plethora of use cases to getting the Apple Mac Mini to run ESXi like any other x86 platform and even getting the Apple Mac Mini added to the VMware HCL. I still remember all the hoops and hacks that one needed to jump through just to boot ESXi and over the years, various VMware Engineers have incrementally helped get us to where we are at today, so a big thanks for all of their support over the years.

Quick Tip - Enabling vCenter Events for NTP (Network Time Protocol) or PTP (Precision Time Protocol) operations

by // 2 Comments

Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 2, you may have noticed a new "Enable monitoring events" setting when configuring time for your ESXi hosts, whether that is using the classic Network Time Protocol (NTP) or the newly introduced Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

What exactly does this enabling this setting do? This was a recent question that I had answered internally and figured I would share the detail as the description may not be super clear. Simply put, this enables the publishing of different NTP and/or PTP operations as vCenter Server Events, which can then be used to audit time skews in your environment for compliance to troubleshooting or debugging.

[Read more...]

Retrieving VM DRS Score using vSphere API and PowerCLI

by // 2 Comments

VM DRS Score is a new feature that was introduced with the release of vSphere 7.0, check out this blog post by Niels for a closer look at how this feature can benefit your environment.


In the vSphere UI, this information is expressed as both a Cluster DRS Score and a VM DRS Score as shown in the screenshot above.

This information can also be retrieved programmatically using the vSphere API, as alluded in the title of this blog post. Using the vSphere API, there is a new property called SummaryEx under the ClusterComputeResource object which represents a vSphere Cluster from an API point of view. Here, you will find two new properties: drsScore and numVmsPerDrsScoreBucket which maps to the respective information found within the vSphere UI.

To demonstrate how to access these two new properties, below is a small PowerCLI function called Get-DRSScore which uses the vSphere API to retrieve this information and accepts a single parameter which is a vSphere Cluster object by using the Get-Cluster cmdlet.

Function Get-DRSScore {
    param(
        [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Impl.V1.Inventory.ComputeResourceImpl]$Cluster
    )

    $drsScoreBuckets = @("0%-20%","21%-40%","41%-60%","61%-80%","81%-100%")

    $drsScoreResults = $Cluster.ExtensionData.SummaryEx | select DrsScore, NumVmsPerDrsScoreBucket

    Write-Host "Cluster DRS Score: $(${drsScoreResults}.DrsScore)`n"

    Write-Host "VM DRS Score"
    $count = 0
    foreach($i in ${drsScoreBuckets}) {
        Write-Host "${i} - $(${drsScoreResults}.NumVmsPerDrsScoreBucket[$count]) VMs"
        $count++
    }
    Write-Host
}

Here is an example of using the function and the output matches what is shown in the vSphere UI.

Get-DRSScore -Cluster (Get-Cluster Cluster-1)