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Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling v3.1

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Here is a small update to the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling which includes a couple of commonly requested features along with some bug fixes.

What's New in v3.1

  • Support for disk format conversion between Thick (Lazy Zeroed), Thick (Eager Zeroed) and Thin provisioning
  • Support for VM rename pattern for Clone operation
  • Fixed duplicated network selection when performing bulk migration
  • Fixed startup failure when a new home vCenter is specified as a command line argument

vSphere HTML5 and Standalone UI Client Support

In our 3.0 release, we added support for a native vSphere HTML5 (H5) Client experience which leverages new remote plugin framework that was introduced in vSphere 6.7 Update 1 and enables customers who prefer to use the H5 Client for their day to day use to also take advantage of the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Tool directly from the same UI. However, the addition of this new consumption UI created some confusion as some folks assumed this was the only mechanism. As stated in the release notes, we support both the new H5 UI as well as the standalone UI which many customers have been using for quite some time.

I suspect the confusion was due to the new CLI syntax which now requires specifying a vCenter Server endpoint to register. It is true that if you wish to use the new H5 Client integration, you will need to have a vSphere 6.7 Update 1 environment and provide credentials to that "home" vCenter Server. However, if you do not wish to use the H5 Client and you wish to use the old standalone client, you simply omit the vCenter Server registration details and the standalone client will work. In fact, even if you decide to use the H5 Client UI, you can always use the standalone client as that is the actual backend of the system.

Option 1: vSphere H5 Client Plugin

The following command will register the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling plugin to the specified vCenter Server:

java -jar xvm-3.1.jar --vcenter.fqdn=VCENTER-IP-OR-FQDN --vcenter.user=ADMIN-USER --vcenter.pass=ADMIN-PASSWORD

You will need to logout and then log back in to see the plugin which is located under "Menu" as shown in the screenshot below.

Option 2: Standalone UI Client

The following command will start the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling in standalone mode:

java -jar xvm-3.0.jar

You can then access the standalone client by opening a browser to localhost and port specified (default is 8443). You can always access the plugin locally whether you are using Option 1 or 2.

ESXi on the new 2019 Apple Mac Pro

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Inquiries from customers on the support for ESXi on the latest 2019 Apple Mac Pro 7,1 has slowly been trickling in since the release of the system in late December. Officially, VMware currently does not support this platform and until we have a unit in-house to investigate further, this is the official stance.

With that said, several folks from the community have reached to me and shared some of their findings as it relates to ESXi with the new Mac Pro. A huge thanks goes out to Mike Rimmer who was able to go through the installation process and identified that the on-board NICs were not automatically detected by ESXI and the installation was unable to proceed. With the extensibility of the Mac Pro, Mike was able to add a supported Intel-based NIC to the system so that we could further understand the issue.

Upon closer investigation, it looks like the new Mac Pro uses two Aquantia based 10GbE NIC which is simliar to the 2018 Mac Mini which requires the Aquantia ESXi driver which was developed earlier last year.

AQC107 NBase-T/IEEE 802.3bz Ethernet Controller [AQtion]
Vendor ID: 0x1d6a
Device ID: 0x07b1

Although Mike did not have a chance to confirm this assumption, I did get validation from another customer who made the same observation when he attempted to install ESXi and once the Aquantia ESXi driver was incorporated into the latest ESXi 6.7 Update 3 image, both on-board NICs were automatically picked up by ESXi and installation was successful.

UPDATE 1 (01/16/19) - Thanks to our Graphics team who was kind enough to loan me their 2019 Mac Pro which literally came in yesterday! I had an idea which I wanted to run an experiment on which was to add a PCIe card w/M.2 NVMe SSD and see whether or not the Apple T2 Security Chip would have any affect on whether or not ESXi would be able to see the device. I was not super optimistic but I had a need for an additional M.2 device, so I went ahead and purchased a $15 PCIe adaptor. I was pleasantly surprise to see that ESXi not only detected the device but I was able to format a local VMFS volume and power up a functional VM! I guess this makes sense as only the Apple SSD's are cryptographically tied to the T2 chip and other PCIe devices would not be and this would allow customers to take advantage of this system right now for running non-MacOS guests (yes, T2 still affects the SMC).

I also ran another experiment by connecting a Thunderbolt 3 chassis which also had a supported M.2 NVMe to see if I was going to be lucky again. Although it looks like ESXi 6.7 Update 3 has resolved the PSOD'ing issue, ESXi was not able to see anything on the other end.

Note: Secure Boot must be disabled on the Mac Pro before you can install ESXi, you can find the instructions in this Apple KB.


This was certainly some good news but like the 2018 Mac Mini, the new 2019 Mac Pro also ships with the Apple T2 Security Chip which has proved challenging for ESXi as mentioned here along with some known caveats. For now, I would hold off making any purchases of the new Mac Pro if you intend to run ESXi. VMware does officially support ESXi on the last current generation of Mac Pro 6,1 along with Mac Mini 6,2 and Mac Mini 7,1 which are all on the official VMware HCL.

I will continue to update this article as new information and findings are shared with me.

Forwarding vCenter Events into AWS EventBridge using vCenter Event Broker Appliance

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After attending Mike Deck's AWS reInvent session last year on Building event-driven architectures faster than ever with Amazon EventBridge, I could not help but draw a number of parallel concepts between AWS EventBridge and our recently released vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. I thought it was a very interesting solution and certainly wanted to give it a try as I think it could really benefit some of our customers, especially for those already using our VMware Cloud on AWS solution and being able to take advantage of the various AWS Services in an event-driven fashion.


In fact, one of the use cases that I had in mind was one that we had from a VMware Cloud on AWS customer who wanted to take a vCenter Event and forward that off to AWS CloudWatch. The solution that I had shared last year was utilizing our vRealize Log Insight Cloud solution which is integrated into VMware Cloud on AWS and leveraging its webhook functionality to call into a AWS Lambda function which would then process the payload directly into CloudWatch. Although this solution works and I know several customers who have implemented something similiar, I think EventBridge could certainly provide a more flexible way to integrate not only with CloudWatch but almost any AWS Service or 3rd party service.

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Intel NUC 9 Pro & Extreme – First “Modular” NUC

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The highly anticipated "modular" Next Unit of Computing (NUC) has just been announced at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week, dubbed the Intel NUC 9 Pro (codename Quartz Canyon) and NUC 9 Extreme (codename Ghost Canyon). Boy am I super excited for this new platform and what it could mean for the VMware Community! 😍

Immediately off the bat, you can see that this is not your typical NUC "cube" form factor. Intel has completely redesigned the system from the inside and out, more on this in a bit. The key difference between the two NUC 9 variants (Pro and Extreme) are the CPU options, which are detailed below. For the remainder of this article, I will be focusing on the Pro version of the NUC 9 and I will call out any differences where applicable.

The use of the word "Pro" is also quite fitting as Intel is positioning this system as a high-end prosumer to Mid-Enterprise device compared to the traditional NUC. The NUC 9 Pro is targeting more demanding workloads such as Digital Content Creation, CAD/Manufacturing and Financial Service applications that either require a high-end graphics card or AI module for computing. When I first heard about this system from Intel, it conceptually reminded me of Apple's recent 2019 Mac Pro, which is also designed with modularity in mind and can cater to a variety of use cases.

Speaking of use cases, although Virtualization is not a target use case for this new platform, VMware customers have been taking advantage of the Intel NUCs for a number of years now and it is still by far the most popular platform for running a vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Lab. However, one common complaint I often hear about the current generations of NUCs has been its CPU and I think the new NUC 9 Pro/Extreme will be a nice contender for current alternatives like the popular Supermicro E200-8D. Thanks to Intel, I was able to get my hands on a pre-production NUC 9 Pro unit for testing, so lets take a closer look at what this new platform has to offer!

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Simulating the VMware Cloud on AWS API using Stoplight Prism Tool

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As more customers and partners on-board the VMware Cloud on AWS service, the topic of Automation has been coming up more frequently. There are a number of resources that are available to help users get started including here, here, here, here and here to just name a few.

Customers and partners can spin up 1-Node SDDC which includes the full stack (vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T), fully configured and ready for use for less than $8/hour (list price) and start exploring the rich APIs provided by the VMware Cloud on AWS service. Nothing beats playing with the real thing but we definitely have heard from customers and new developers that it would be nice to have the ability to test out some of the Automation prior to running against a real SDDC.

The VMware Cloud APIs is based on OpenAPI (formally Swagger) and has a very rich eco-system of tools that are available to developers and end-users. One really cool thing you can do with OpenAPIs is to "mock" or simulate the APIs just based on your API specification. This is really useful for API development but it can also come in handy for end users to be able to try out your APIs. Prism Mock by Stoplight is an OpenAPI mocking tool that was introduced to me by Jake Robinson.

Over the break, I finally found some time to play with this tool and I think this could be really useful for those wanting to get a taste of the various VMware Cloud APIs. As I have mentioned already, nothing beats the real APIs and there are some limitations with the mocking tool, so you should still consider using the real APIs when you are ready.

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ESXi on 10th Gen Intel NUC (Frost Canyon)

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Just a heads up, if you are considering the latest 10th Generation of the Intel NUC (formally known as Frost Canyon) which are now available on Amazon, Newegg & SimplyNUC, there is an issue to be aware of. The onboard Intel NIC is not detected by ESXi which prevents the installer from proceeding. This issue was reported by a fellow reader named Ben who reached out to me over the holiday and with his help, I was able to get access to the system. It looks like the these NUCs have a newer version of I219-V NIC which is currently not recognized by either the vmklinux e1000 or ne1000 driver.

UPDATE (01/20/20) - As shared on Twitter last Friday, we now have an updated ne1000 driver that will detect the Intel NIC found in the new 10th Gen NUC. You will need to replace the existing ne1000 driver with the new offline bundle, which can be downloaded from here. I would like to remind folks that the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform from VMware and although have have enable this new system for the community, it does not mean this system or previous generations are supported.

There are two options to author a new ESXi Image Profile containing the ne1000 driver, the easiest method is if you have an existing vCenter Server and using the vSphere H5 Client and Image Builder UI. Import latest ESXi 6.7 Update 3 Image Profile offline bundle along with the ne1000 offline bundle and then de-select the existing ne1000 driver as shown in the screenshot below.


Next, select the update ne1000 driver and then export the new Image Profile to an ISO which can then be used to install on the NUC.


For more details on how to use Image builder, please have a look at the official VMware documentation linked below.

Option 1: Use vSphere H5 Client and Image Builder UI in vCenter Server to create the new Image Profile with the ne1000 driver.

Option 2: Use PowerCLI and the Image Builder cmdlets to create the a new Image Profile with the ne1000 driver.

For those interested, here is the PCI ID mapping for the new NIC, which is also NOT on VMware's HCL.

0000:00:1f.6 Network controller Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (10) I219-V
Class 0200: 8086:0d4f

Manually adding the PCI ID to the map files (which we had initially tried) will also not work as changes to the driver would be required to enable this device. At this time, if you wish to use this system with ESXi, it is recommended that you use the ESXi Native Driver for USB NIC Fling along with a supported USB NIC to get network connectivity and ESXi to install.