vSphere Assessment Tool (vSAT)

If you are not aware, there is a new tool announced during VMworld US 2019. That is the vSphere Assessment Tool (vSAT).

To access the site, you can go here. The tool can be run on any endpoint that runs Windows, Linux and Mac.

Upon login, you will see the screen below.

Clicking on the Download, you will see the supported binary for the endpoint of choice.

You will need to set a Passcode at the site so when you can upload it with the passcode. This passcode is to ensure the data is tie back to your account.

Do note that your endpoint that runs the tool, must have access to your vSphere environment to collect the information to perform the assessment. You can add one or many vCenter to the assessment tool.

Once completed, you can download the JSON file from the assessment tool and upload to the portal. You can check out the file, it does not contain sensitive data related to your environment but more of vSphere component versions. Feel free to open up and check it out.

There is a Global Privacy Notice on using the tool when using the assessment.

Let take a look at the assessment tool. 

You would need permission for the administrator with Host Settings Enabled permission as shown.

You can choose to upload online or offline to the portal. To upload online you can do it over in the client. To upload offline, you can save it to a local copy and upload it in the portal as shown above after setting a passcode.

From the portal, we will be able to see the vSphere version, the storage and driver support on the version of vSphere. Results are compared with VMware Hardware Compatibility Matrix.

You can also export out this data out as CSV format.

Have a play around with it and have a better visibility of your environment.

vSphere 6.0 End of General Support

If you are not aware, vSphere 6.0 is coming to the end of general support on 12th Mar 2020. If you are still running 6.0 or below, it is a good time to quickly planned for an upgrade to at least version 6.5 or 6.7 since it got extended for a full 5 years from the day of release for vSphere 6.5 which is 15th Nov 2021.

You can refer to the KB. Once the end of general support, what this means is, there will be no new patches to fix bugs. You will only get support based on what is recorded in KBs. Also things without any engineering effort. You will only receive technical guidance before the end of support.

Here is a good article to understand the different support after End of Life of a product.

VMware vExpert 2020 Application To Be Open on 25th Nov 2019

Yes, you read it correctly. The vExpert program for the year 2020 will be open next Monday, 25th Nov 2019 PST. This has been announced in the vExpert Twitter tweet.

To recap for those who are applying.

• My experience
• FAQ to be qualified, show your contribution
• vExpert portal to create an account to apply and benefits list
• List of vExpert Pro around the world to help you

Get ready your engine. Make your Mark!

Update 26th Nov 2019 SGT
The application has gone live.

VMworld 2019 Barcelona Summary

Here is a summary that was announced during VMware VMworld 2019 Barcelona.

As usual, the remind which was announced in VMworld 2019 US on VMware Tanzu hit the stage once again in Barcelona.

Here are the summary of what was announced:

• VMware Workspace One delivers Day Zero Employee experience [news]
• Workspace one for Microsoft Endpoint Manager to manage the wide deployment of Windows 10 devices. [news] [article]
• Project Maestro, VMware Telco Cloud Orchestrator across 4G and 5G [article] [news]
• VMware new Security Solutions brings intrinsic security to the modern distributed enterprise [news] [NSX Distributed IPS/IDS]

At the same time, vRealize Network Insight 5.1 was released with support for assessment for VMC on AWS and NSX SD-WAN. It also includes Application Day 2 operations performance by observing the degrading in traffic. Check out more details here.

VMware Workstation Device Credential Guard

Recently someone asked me why are they not able to open up a converted VM using VMware vCenter Converter Standalone which was migrated from Hyper-V Gen 2 VM running on their Windows 10 machine with VMware Workstation.

The error they hit was something that looks like below to Device/Credential Guard issue. Do note that this does not happen on VMware Fusion on Mac OS. You will know why later.


If you follow the KB, it is meant for Workstation 12 and below workaround. What if you are running something higher?

Typically this happens on Windows 10 machine and if you are on a joined domain, this is likely unable to be resolved if your Group Policy turns on Device/Credential Guard.

Let's understand what is this Device/Credential Guard. What this is doing is, it is running another layer of a hypervisor, in this case, Hyper-V on your Windows 10. In such, VMware workstation is unable to run any virtual machines are your machine is already been abstracted by another virtualization engine.

So if your machine is not Group Policy, what you can do is to check this setting on your Windows 10 machine to make sure it is turned off Memory integrity under Core isolation. This can be found in your Windows Settings, Security, Device Security.

Once that is turned off, you will need to restart your machine and VMware workstation should run as per normal.

VMware Odyssey™ at vForum 2019 Singapore

This year, from the success of vWarrior last year, VMware Singapore is hosting VMware Odyssey™ at #vFORUMSG Singapore. VMware Odyssey (rebrand) was held at VMworld 2019 this year and will be in VMworld Barcelona as well.

If you haven't registered for vForum 2019 Singapore, which will be on 14th Nov, Friday, head over here.

This is a competition among teams to showcase your technical capabilities in our Hands-on Lab environment across the VMware portfolio of solutions and win exciting prizes!

There will be 4 rounds of Odyssey (Group stage, Voyagers of Venus (VoV), Semi-Finals and Finals). Voyagers of Venus (VoV) will be the bonus round and all teams that are participating (who have a female in their team) will be able to participate in that round. 

The difference is that we are only allowing the females of the team to enter the tournament area, cause we want to showcase their capabilities. 

The top 3 teams from the VoV round will help their team receive time reduction from their group stage which might help advance them to the semi-finals.

Do you have what it takes? If so, what are you waiting for?

Sign up today and be part of the excitement: https://bit.ly/2oIsSCX

VMware Standalone Converter When Do You Use It?

I see that many have asked to use some migration tool to help in migration whether from physical or from a different platform source. One of these tools that can be used is the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone.

This is not just a special tool, it is a free tool. With the end of support for vSphere 5.x and also vSphere 6.0 coming soon, I have seen many trying to use this tool to move to a new version platform such as vSphere 6.5/6.7.

Where this is one solution, this tool is largely used to convert a physical machine to a virtual machine or a different virtual machine from another hypervisor to a virtual machine on vSphere.

By all means, you can use the converter tool to convert VM from vSphere 5.x/6.0 to vSphere 6.5/6.7, but is there a need to add that complexity? VMs that run on vSphere is already in a similar format supported. In such, there is no need to use the converter tool to do the job. Rather you can leverage on normal backup restore, or even just remove from inventory from the older version cluster to the new version cluster by attaching the datastore to the new version cluster.

Physical to Virtual (P2V) or Virtual to Virtual (V2V) is what the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone tool is used for from a different platform to vSphere. So V2V migration is actually treating the source VM from a different platform as a physical server and migrate it over to vSphere VM.

I hope this clarifies the use. To get VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, get it here. To know which is the destination vCenter Server version that is supported, refer to the VMware Product Interoperability Matrices to stay up to date.