PowerCLI: Get or Set VAAI Settings for VMware Hosts

During a recent technical engagement with a vendor, my team was asked to verify that VAAI was disabled for all hosts attached to that vCenter. There are several different ways to go about doing this, so I figured I would put this blog post together to showcase some of the different ways in which this can be accomplished. There are three settings that need to be reviewed (or changed). They are: DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove, DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedInit, and VMFS3.HardwareAcceleratedLocking. A value of 1 means the setting is enabled, and a value of 0 means the setting is disabled.

PowerCLI: Find a VM Based on RDM’s LUN ID

Let’s say you have a LUN ID that you clearly know is a RDM. How do you determine what virtual machine is associated with that disk?

Recently, I was prepping a cluster for routine ESXi patching. As part of my preparation, I scanned the cluster for RDM disks first to ensure that they were set to Perennially Reserved = True. After doing the RDM scan, I found a cluster that had a single RDM disk, but didn’t know which VM it was associated with. Although VMware has a Knowledge Base article (KB2001823) on how to do find RDM’s and which VM’s they’re associated with, it looks like it will find all RDM’s and VM’s across the entire vCenter Server. Since I know the cluster, and I know the RDM LUN ID, I wanted to narrow down the results for my particular needs.

Creating a UEFI-Enabled VM in VMware Fusion 8.x

Update: 2018-OCT-01 – This post applies to VMware Fusion version 8.x and older. Updates were made in VMware Fusion 10 to make it easier to create a UEFI-enabled VM from the GUI.

Let’s say you want to build a new VMware Fusion virtual machine using the newer UEFI firmware instead of the traditional BIOS. How is that done in VMware Fusion? Unlike VMware Workstation and ESXi, there’s no GUI-based option to choose EFI over BIOS (at least as of this writing). So, I decided to put this post together to walk you through the process. I should also point out that this needs to be done before an operating system is installed to the VM.

If you’re not sure what the differences are between UEFI and BIOS, How-To-Geek has two great articles that explain how newer UEFI firmware differs from traditional BIOS; “What Is UEFI, and How Is It Different from BIOS?” and “What You Need to Know About Using UEFI Instead of the BIOS.”

Building a New Virtual Machine in VMware Fusion

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how to setup and install a brand-new virtual machine using VMware Fusion. For this post, I’ll be installing a fresh copy of Microsoft Windows to use as an example, but these same steps should apply to just about any operating system. Let’s get started!

List RDM Disks in a Cluster Using PowerCLI

Hello everyone! Earlier today, I was looking for a way to list the RDM disks that are currently attached and in use by VMs within a specific cluster. See, we’re in the process of decommissioning an old SAN array, and I needed to verify that specific LUNs and RDMs were no longer in use. I came across this post over on the VMware Communities portal, but needed made a minor tweak, as I only wanted to search a specific cluster. By the way… HUGE thanks to user LucD for posting the original script! After running this script, I was then able to search the output to ensure that the LUN WWNs I needed to decommission weren’t in the list.

$report = @()
$vms = Get-Cluster -name "Cluster01" | Get-VM | Get-View
foreach($vm in $vms){
     foreach($dev in $vm.Config.Hardware.Device){
          if(($dev.gettype()).Name -eq "VirtualDisk"){
               if(($dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode -eq "physicalMode") -or 
               ($dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode -eq "virtualMode")){
                    $row = "" | select VMName, VMHost, HDDeviceName, HDFileName, HDMode, HDsize, HDDisplayName
                    $row.VMName = $vm.Name
                    $esx = Get-View $vm.Runtime.Host
                    $row.VMHost = ($esx).Name
                    $row.HDDeviceName = $dev.Backing.DeviceName
                    $row.HDFileName = $dev.Backing.FileName
                    $row.HDMode = $dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode
                    $row.HDSize = $dev.CapacityInKB
                    $row.HDDisplayName = ($esx.Config.StorageDevice.ScsiLun | where {$_.Uuid -eq $dev.Backing.LunUuid}).DisplayName
                    $report += $row
               }
          }
     }
}
$report