vSphere 8.0 Update 2 was just announced last week at VMware Explore and it brings a lot of exciting new capabilities, check out this What's New in vSphere 8.0 Update 2 and What's New in vSAN 8.0 Update 2 blog posts for a nice summary of all the new features.
While doing some testing in my vSphere 8.0 Update 2 lab, I came to learn about a really cool feature that has been requested by customers over the years, which is the ability to configure a read-only virtual disk (VMDK). The most common use case for this feature is being able to share a single VMDK across multiple Virtual Machines and prevent any changes to the original data, a common scenario for VMware App Volumes or VMware Horizon environments.
I could also see this capability get leveraged by users as a way to distribute and install software where traditional application management systems are unavailable but still ensuring that workloads can not manipulate or modify the original files, definitely opens the door for some interesting capabilities.