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Retrieving vCenter Server certificate (Machine, VMCA Root, STS & Trusted Root) details using the vSphere API 

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In the vSphere UI, users can easily view and manage all of their vCenter Server certificates by navigating to Administration->Certificate->Certificate Management as shown in the screenshot below.


There are four types of vCenter Server certificates: Machine SSL, VMware Certificate Authority, STS Signing Certificate and the Trusted Root. On the main summary view, we can see the validity of the certificate, which is useful to quickly determine if you need to plan on replacing a specific certificate. We can also get more information about a specific certificate by clicking on the "View Details".

A question recently came up internally asking whether there is a vSphere API to retrieve all of this information programmatically, especially the validity of the certificate?

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Automating Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) configuration using vSphere API and PowerCLI

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After publishing my recent article on the new the vSphere Health capability which takes advantage of VMware's Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), I had a couple of folks reach out asking how their customers could check whether CEIP is enabled for a given vCenter Server and if not, how to enable it using Automation. For one of these customers, they had over 25+ vCenter Server, so they were not interested in doing this by hand and nor should they.

For those interested in the vSphere UI, the CEIP settings is configured in the Administration menu under the Deployment section as shown in the screenshot below.


We can also manage the CEIP settings programmatically using vSphere API and this is controlled by an Advanced vCenter Server setting called VirtualCenter.DataCollector.ConsentData. The value of this property is actually a JSON payload as you can see in the screenshot below and when updating this property, we need to update both the change version as well as whether we want CEIP enabled or disabled for a given vCenter Server.

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Instant Clone Microsoft Windows & VM Keystroke VMworld demo and code posted

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Apologies for the delay in getting my VMworld 2018 demo and code posted online, I know a number of you have been asking about the Windows Instant Clone samples to get an idea on how to create your own customization scripts for managing more "recent" Microsoft Windows releases 😉 and perhaps you might even consider submitting a pull request to share with the community. I have posted both the videos and code samples below. Enjoy and happy Automating!

Instant Clone Microsoft Windows

To demonstrate the power of the newly re-architected Instant Clone feature in vSphere 6.7 and to help make the point clear that the Instant Clone feature is really Guest Operating System agnostic, meaning you can Instant Clone any to Virtual Machine that can run VMware Tools, I thought it would be fun to see how old of a Microsoft OS that I could Instant Clone. After a bit of trial/error, that turned out to be Windows 98 and Windows 2000 🙂

Windows 98 Demo


Windows 2000 Demo


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