New i4i.metal Instance Type Available for VMware Cloud on AWS

Hello again, everyone! VMware and AWS have announced that the new i4i bare metal instance type is now available for VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS customers! This new instance type offers new capacity options and performance enhancements compared to the prior i3 and i3en bare metal instance types. Here’s a quick look at how the three instance types compare:

i3	i3en	i4i
Intel Xeon E5-2686 36 cores @ 2.3 GHz 72 logical cores	Intel Xeon Cascade Lake 48 cores @ 2.5 GHz 96 logical cores	Intel Xeon Ice Lake 64 cores @ 3.5 GHz 128 logical cores
512 GiB RAM	768 GiB RAM	1,024 GiB RAM
vSAN with local NVMe All-Flash SSD	vSAN with local NVMe All-Flash SSD	vSAN with local AWS Nitro SSDs
15.2 TiB (8x SSD) Raw Storage Capacity	60 TiB (8x SSD) Raw Storage Capacity	30 TiB (8x Nitro SSD) Raw Storage Capacity
25 Gbps Network	100 Gbps Network	75 Gbps Network
AWS i3.metal Spec	AWS i3en.metal Spec	AWS i4i.metal Spec

AWS EC2 bare metal instance types and high-level specifications

AWS Regional Availability

• At launch, the i4i.metal instance type is available in the following AWS regions:
• Americas
  • US West (N. California)
  • US West (Oregon)
  • US East (N. Virginia)
  • US East (Ohio)
  • Canada (Central)
• Europe
  • Europe (Ireland)
  • Europe (London)
  • Europe (Paris)
  • Europe (Frankfurt)
• Asia
  • Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
  • Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
  • Asia Pacific (Singapore)
  • Asia Pacific (Sydney)
• Additional regional availability coming soon

While this just scratches the surface in terms of what’s available, you can learn more at the links below.

Additional Resources

VMware’s VMC on AWS i4i.metal announcement: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud/2022/08/30/announcing-a-new-instance-type-for-vmware-cloud-on-aws-i4i-metal
VMware Cloud on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/vmware

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Announcing the General Availability of VMware vSphere 7.0 U3f

Update as of July 24, 2022: If your vCenter Server is or was previously attached to an Active Directory domain that used Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) as an Identity Source, skip this vCenter release and go to vCenter 7.0 U3g. VMware KB 89027 explains the issue in more detail.

As of July 12, 2022, VMware has officially released vSphere version 7.0 U3f. This particular release addresses a number of security patches for vCenter Server, including CVE-2022-22982. This particular CVE has a CVSSv3 score of 5.3 (Moderate) and is explained in more detail in VMware’s VMSA-2022-0018 Security Advisory.

As for ESXi, this patch release addresses a number of security advisories, PRs, as well as updating drivers and VIBs on ESXi hosts. The specific security advisories addressed in this release include: CVE-2022-23816, CVE-2022-23825, CVE-2022-26373, CVE-2022-28693, and CVE-2022-29901. These security advisories are explained in more detail in VMware’s VMSA-2022-0020 Security Advisory.

vCenter Server 7.0 U3f | Build 20051473

Release Notes: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-vcenter-server-70u3f-release-notes.html
Documentation: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/index.html
Download: https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/7_0

ESXi 7.0 U3f | Build 20036589

Release Notes: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-esxi-70u3f-release-notes.html

Announcing the General Availability of VMware vSphere 7.0 U3d

As of March 29, 2022, VMware has officially released vSphere version 7.0 U3d. The most notable thing I’ve seen from this patch release is that the vCenter Server patch addresses CVE-2022-22948. This particular CVE has a CVSSv3 score of 5.5 (Moderate) and is explained in more detail in VMware’s VMSA-2022-0009 Security Advisory. As for ESXi, this patch release addresses a number of issues and PRs, as well as updating drivers and VIBs on ESXi hosts.

vCenter Server 7.0 U3d | Build 19480866

Release Notes: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-vcenter-server-70u3d-release-notes.html
Documentation: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/index.html
Download: https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/7_0

ESXi 7.0 U3d | Build 19482537

Release Notes: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-esxi-70u3d-release-notes.html

PowerCLI: Find VMs Based on Virtual Hardware Version

Hello again, everyone! For my fifth post for this year’s #BlogtoberTech challenge, I decided to share a script I recently wrote that seeks out virtual machines in a vSphere environment based on a specific virtual hardware version. This sort of ties in with the BIOS and UEFI scripts I wrote earlier in the year to seek out VMs that may still be open to the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities (virtual hardware version 8 or older). Or perhaps someone wants to seek out VMs that may be good candidates to enable Secure Boot (virtual hardware 13 or newer with EFI boot firmware configured).

In the initial version of this script, I ask the user to pick the vCenter to connect to, the datacenter object to scan, and then the virtual hardware version to seek out. If VMs of virtual hardware n are found, the user has the option of exporting the results to a CSV file. Otherwise, a dialog box will appear (via Out-GridView) that shows the results of the can. If, however, no VMs with a specified virtual hardware version are found, it will simply let the user know that “No VMs with virtual hardware n were found.”

As usual, the latest version of this script can be found over on my GitHub page, but here’s the script as it was written at the time of this post:

My Upcoming Central PA VMUG Presentation

Hey everyone! I wanted to spread the word about my upcoming presentation at the Central PA VMUG on Thursday, November 1st in State College! Last year, I spoke at the Pittsburgh VMUG on the topic of PowerCLI and my journey into scripting. This year, I plan on revisiting that presentation with several new updates and maybe even do live demo (assuming I can get my home lab completely set up and configured in time)! Plus, I’m looking forward to catching up with the Central PA VMUG crew as well as meeting many others in the #vCommunity!

For those who may not know, October 2017 was my first time ever presenting at a local VMUG meeting. In fact, I wasn’t really engaged in the VMware Community all that much until about April 2017, when I started my blog and began using Twitter a lot more. Sure, I’ve been using VMware’s products and services since about 2010, but the only real ‘engagement’ I’ve done in the community was attend the occasional VMUG or UserCon.

PowerCLI: Find VMs with Any Independent Disks

I recently had a request come through to see if there was a way to quickly find any/all virtual machines with Independent Disks attached. In this particular scenario, I’ll be looking for these types of VMs within a specific datacenter object. However, this script could easily be changed to scan an entire vCenter object, if needed. This script will look for VMs with both independent persistent as well as independent non-persistent disks.

Like some of my other scripts, this one also utilizes the try/catch when first connecting to a vCenter Server. For instance, if you attempt to connect to a vCenter and enter the wrong credentials or wrong server name/IP, it will stop the script and state that it “Could not connect to the vCenter Server <name>. In addition, I also have some logic built in to track the progress of the scan, as well as the option to export the results to CSV if preferred.

PowerCLI: Quickly Look Up VM’s Boot Firmware Setting

A few months ago, I wrote two blog posts about how to find all UEFI- or BIOS-enabled virtual machines at the data center level within a vCenter Server. But what if you just want to quickly look up the boot firmware setting of a specific VM or even just a few of them?

I wrote this script as a way to quickly look up a small number of VMs to see if they might be good candidates for enabling Secure Boot or not. If you recall from those two posts, in order to enable Secure Boot, a VM needs to have virtual hardware version 13 or higher (meaning vSphere 6.5 or higher), and the VM boot firmware needs to be set to EFI.

PowerCLI: Find BIOS-Enabled VMs

This script is an idea that spun off of my previous post, PowerCLI: Find UEFI-Enabled VMs. If you’re preparing to enable Secure Boot in a VMware environment, it may be helpful to identify the VMs that cannot be upgraded. As you might recall, enabling secure boot requires the following:

• VMware vSphere 6.5 or higher
• Virtual hardware version 13 or higher
• VMs need to be configured with EFI boot firmware

PowerCLI: Find UEFI-Enabled VMs

With all the news regarding the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities over the past several months, there’s been a greater focus to get VMware virtual machines to virtual hardware version 9 or higher, as noted by Andrea Mauro’s post regarding these vulnerabilities. In addition to that, several companies and organizations may be looking to enable Secure Boot, a feature first introduced with vSphere 6.5. However, in order to enable secure boot, the virtual machine needs to be configured with both EFI boot firmware AND be on virtual hardware version 13 or higher.

Finding NICs That Aren’t VMXNET3

Earlier this week, someone on our team received a request to change a VMware virtual machine’s NIC from e1000 to VMXNET3. While the change was a bit manual in nature due to the Guest OS configuration changes, it got us thinking… How many other VM’s might still have e1000 NIC adapters? So, I started working on a script to find out.