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Quick Tip - New remote version of ESXCLI 8.x

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I was recently made aware of a nice update from our developers that we now have a new version of the remote ESXCLI utility that is much simpler to install across any operating system and is fully backwards compatibility with ESXi hosts running 6.7.x, 7.x and 8.x.

Many of you are probably familiar with the local version of ESXCLI which is available when connecting to ESXi whether that is over SSH or directly in the ESXi Console. However, a remote version of ESXCLI has been available since the introduction of ESXCLI back in vSphere 4.0, but surprisingly, I still come across users who never knew that this was possible!

In the past, the remote version of ESXCLI was platform specific and it was distributed in a number of diffrent ways from being bundled as part of the vSphere CLI (6.7) to being a standalone download (7.0) and this inconsistency brought many challenges, not just from an internal development standpoint but also operationally for users who needed to deploy this utility across their administrative systems.

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vSphere UI behavior change for VM Disk I/O Shares & Limits in vSphere 8.x

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If you use the vSphere UI to configure individual virtual disk I/O shares or limits for a Virtual Machine, it looks like this functionality has been removed in vSphere 8.x in favor of using VM Storage Policies, which has been around for almost a decade now.

Prior to vSphere 8.x, you could configure both disk shares and limits on an individual VMDK as shown in this screenshot below for a vSphere 7.x environment:


While this capability can be useful, it does come with some operational overhead of having to configure each and every virtual disk that has such a requirement and can certainly be error prone. Fortunately, this problem of defining various storage requirements and attributes for a VM and its virtual disks has already been solved with Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) and the use of VM Storage Policies.

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Improved VM Storage Policy (Profile-driven storage) privileges in vSphere 8.x

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A couple of weeks ago I had noticed a few internal folks were asking about missing Profile-driven storage privileges in vSphere 8.x when referring to 2nd party VMware documentation asking for two privileges called "Profile-driven storage update" and "Profile-driven storage view" which no longer exists in vSphere 8.x when compared to the vSphere 7.x documentation.

At first, I thought this was purely a rename issue as the underlying feature of these privileges has always been known as VM Storage Policies, which is even used in the vSphere 7.x UI and has been around for quite some time. It looks like in earlier releases, the vSphere UI label for the privilege was still using the older name.

Here is a a screenshot of a vSphere 7.x environment where you can see the original two privilege names:


Here is a a screenshot of a vSphere 8.x environment, which now actually lists seven privileges, which has lead to some additional confusion.


Furthermore, it looks like these additional VM Storage Policy privileges have also not been updated in the vSphere 8.x documentation, which is currently a known issue and only references the renamed privileges.

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