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Quick Tip - Inventory core count for vSphere+, vSAN+ & VCF+ Cloud Service

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vSphere+ and vSAN+ was launched last year as a new cloud service and the unit of consumption are CPU cores, which needs to be determined prior to purchasing a subscription for either cloud services. To help customers inventory their existing vSphere and vSAN CPU core usage, especially useful for general visibility and planning purposes, I had developed a simple PowerCLI function that was published last year as a VMware KB article (89116).

In recent weeks, I had noticed an increased number of inquiries from our field and customers on how to assess their existing vSphere and vSAN environment for transition to vSphere+ and vSAN+ and I realized that many folks may not have been aware of the scripts and the KB article that was available.

Once you have downloaded the PowerCLI script, imported the function and connect to an existing vCenter Server environment, you can then use the Get-vSpherePlusCPUSocketToCoreUsage function which will automatically retrieve all ESXi hosts within your vCenter Server and display the current CPU core usage, vSphere+ Cores and vSAN+ Cores required as shown in the example screenshot below.

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Automating Virtual Machine screenshots in vSphere

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I was recently reminded of an old article that I wrote back in 2013 demonstrating how to capture Virtual Machine screenshots using a couple of options that are available within vSphere. While the blog post is more than 10 years old, the guidance and options are still applicable for all recent vSphere releases.

I highly recommend folks give the original article a read, especially for the full background but I did want to provide some updated information for those interested in automating the capture of VM screenshots using both the vSphere API as well as the HTTP Handler methods.

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vSphere Session Timeout Overview

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I periodically get questions about vSphere "session timeouts" and because there are several different session timeouts in vSphere, there is usually a back and fourth to understand which session timeout a user is specifically asking about? 🙂

Once the specific vSphere session timeout has been identified, the next series of questions are typically:

  • What is the default or current value?
  • Is it configurable?
  • If so, where and how can I change it?

To help simplify questions around this topic, I have put together this quick overview that also includes details for each specific session timeout and where to find and update the values.

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