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Identifying vSphere with Tanzu Managed VMs

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With an increasing number of customers enabling the vSphere with Tanzu capability, which is included in both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), more and more Virtual Machines will be deployed using the more modern approach of declarative provisioning using the powerful VM Service feature.


When using the vSphere UI, you can easily distinguish between a vSphere with Tanzu managed VM from a traditional VM by checking whether it is provisioned within a vSphere Namespace or whether it contains the "Developer Managed" label as shown in the screenshot above.

However, how do you identify a vSphere with Tanzu managed VM when using the vSphere API for Automation purposes?

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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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