Almost on a daily basis, I get questions from colleagues and customers about specific advanced settings. Somehow they spotted a vSphere advanced setting and wonder if they should set it. They go on a hunt to figure out what it is this specific vSphere advanced setting does and typically find a description on a random website that makes it sound like it is a good idea to configure it. I even had someone asking if I could give a list of all optimized values for the advanced kernel parameters recently. My answer was short and maybe a bit blunt, but I think it was clear:

I hope the sign above makes it clear you should not randomly set advanced settings. Some of you will laugh and say “well that is obvious” while others probably will scratch their head and open their vSphere client and check the advanced settings section. I know I discuss advanced settings every once in a while, but you should only apply these settings when:

You have a requirement to implement this advanced setting, do not tweak them “just because you can”. An example would be in a stretched cluster you set “disk.terminateVMOnPDLDefault” because of the infrastructure implemented. The advanced setting solves a problem in your environment (and preferably, in that case, see 3) When recommended by VMware Global Support Services

If you have implemented an advanced setting, document it and with every update or upgrade validate it is still applicable to that specific version or not. (If you are aspiring to be a VCDX, this is key.) If it no longer applies, remove revert to default!

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