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Useful NVMe Tiering reporting using vSphere 8.0 Update 3 APIs

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After successfully enabling the NVMe Tiering feature, which was introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 3, you can find some useful details about your NVMe Tiering configuration by navigating to a specific ESXi host and under Configure->Hardware and under the Memory section as shown in the screenshot below.


There is quite a bit of information that we can see, so lets break down the individual items that are useful from an NVMe Tiering point of view and the specific vSphere APIs that can be used to retrieve this information.

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NVMe Tiering in vSphere 8.0 Update 3 is a Homelab game changer!

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As someone who is always on the lookout for interesting and clever ways to make the most out of your vSphere homelab investment, I was surprised there has not been more noise about the new NVMe Tiering capability in vSphere 8.0 Update 3!?

NVMe Tiering is currently in Tech Preview and it enables ESXi to use an NVMe device as a secondary tier of memory for your workloads, which IMHO makes it one of the killer features in vSphere 8.0 Update 3, especially with some interesting implications for Homelabs!

As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words ...


Picture on the left shows a system with 64GB of memory (DRAM) that is available before enabling NVMe Tiering and on the right, the amount of memory that is available after enabling the NVMe Tiering which is whopping 480GB! 🤯

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Easily audit ESXi boot options programmatically in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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ESXi (kernel) boot options can be added during ESXi boot up (by pressing SHIFT+O) or by updating the ESXi boot.cfg configuration to influence specific configurations and/or behaviors.

In the past, it was difficult to get visibility across your fleet of ESXi hosts on which hosts might be using custom boot options, especially in cases where you might not need them anymore or worse if someone has manually added a configuration that you did not intend.

In vSphere 8.0 Update 3, a new bootCommandLine property has been added to the vSphere API and can now provide full visibility into all boot options used for a given ESXi host.

PowerCLI 13.3 had also GA'ed yesterday, which supports latest APIs introduced in both vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2  and you can easily access this new property by running the following command:

(Get-VMHost).ExtensionData.Hardware.SystemInfo