William Lam

Apple Mac Mini on VMware HCL!

08/01/2019 by William Lam 4 Comments

For the past 6 years, the Apple Mac Mini has been one of the most popular hardware platforms for Virtualizing MacOS running on VMware vSphere enabling our customers to develop and build iOS and MacOS applications. With that said, VMware has historically only supported two Apple hardware platforms: Xserve (now EOL'd) and the Mac Pro (6,1) which is officially listed on VMware's Hardware Compatibility list and this has been officially supported by VMware since 2012 when we first introduced support for MacOS Virtualization with the vSphere 5.0 release.

As many of you know, I have been a huge advocate of this platform for a number of years now and I have been working with various Engineers over the years to ensure that we have the exact same user experience when working with ESXi on the Mac Mini as you do with the Mac Pro. I still recall in the early days where it took several "hacks" to get ESXi to successfully boot and install.

Today, ESXi installs on the Mac Mini just like any other x86 platform. It runs amazing well for our customers, especially for a consumer device, who have deployed them in their datacenters ranging from a couple hundred to several thousands for some of our larger Enterprise customers, one such example is MacStadium, the largest Apple Infrastructure-as-a-service provider which many of the Fortune 100/500 companies are leveraging to provide them with a platform to build and develop for the Apple eco-system.

How to prevent physical CD-ROM from ejecting after installing or upgrading ESXi?

07/15/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

While catching up on some news over the weekend, I had noticed a VMware Reddit thread asking a pretty interesting question on how to prevent the physical CD-ROM tray from ejecting after installing or upgrading ESXi? This behavior occurs whether you are using a physical CD-ROM media or a "Virtual" ISO image via an out-of-band interface like an iDRAC or iLO. If you are automating the installation or upgrade using Auto Deploy or network installation such as Kickstart, this is not a problem.

However, I was a bit surprised to hear that this was still a pain point in 2019, as many of the new servers in market do not even include an option for CD-ROM. Some of the suggestions really brought me back to the early 2000's including physically taping up the CD-DROM tray, which I have definitely seen customers doing but this is not a scalable solution and it requires a visit to the datacenter.

One easy solution that I had suggested was to take advantage of ESXi's scripted installation capability also known as Kickstart and use the supported ESXi --noeject option after reboot. Since the install/upgrade was being done manually, the added benefit of this solution is that you can now have it automated 🙂 The other nice thing about this option is that you can specify the kickstart using the default ESXi ISO or you can take it a step further and embed the Kickstart with a custom ESXi ISO.

Configuring Standalone vRealize Orchestrator with VMware Cloud on AWS

07/11/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is powerful workflow engine that many of our customers have been using to automate across a number of different VMware and 3rd party solutions. It is also a foundational component to vRealize Automation (vRA) and it enables our customers to build end-to-end IT and Developer workflows across different Clouds: Private, Public and Hybrid.

It should come as no surprise that existing vRO/vRA customers would like to take advantage of VMware Cloud on AWS and be able to add its vCenter Server instance to vRO for Automation purposes. A few weeks back, I had heard mixed results from our field and customers when attempting to add VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter Server endpoint to vRO. I was actually working with another customer on a related topic and I decided I give this a try in my lab, which was running the standalone vRO 7.5 Appliance.

I did indeed run into a problem when attempting to add vCenter Server as an endpoint in vRO. It turns out this was due to a bug with the vSphere vRO Plugin which has since been resolved with the latest vRO 7.6 release. In any case, there is a simple workaround for customers that are currently not running the latest vRO appliance and you can find the instructions below.

Automated ESXi Installation to USB using Kickstart

07/09/2019 by William Lam 5 Comments

I frequently re-install ESXi on my physical host for various types of testing as I normally work with a number of future releases. Although the process just takes a couple of minutes, having to enter the exact same information each time and also requiring a keyboard and monitor is not really ideal. For the majority, this is really not a problem and manually going through the install workflow is fine for most folks, especially as this is an infrequent operation.

However, with some recent customer conversations, I thought it was worth while to re-visit this topic and demonstrating just how easy it is to automate the installation of ESXi with just a single bootable USB device and embedding an ESXi Kickstart Script. Even for infrequent installation and/or upgrades of ESXi for home labs, this can be a time saver, especially if you do not have monitor and keyboard just lying around. Below are instructions including a reference Kickstart example that folks can use as a starting point. For more advanced automation, please take a look at my ESXI Kickstart Resources as well as the official VMware documentation for ESXi Scripted Installations.

Automating HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh configuration using the new HCX PowerCLI cmdlets

07/01/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

With the latest Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) R121 release, the new HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh configuration option is now the default and preferred method for setting up HCX. In fact, the legacy "HCX Components" method, which is focused on deploying individual HCX Appliances has been deprecated in the latest release and will be removed in the future, in favor of the new simplified deployment option.

As many of you know, I have been doing quite a bit of HCX Automation with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) and with the recent PowerCLI 11.3 release which now includes new HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh (MSSM) cmdlets, I figured this would be a good time to update my automation to take advantage of the new HCX MSSM feature.

While trying out the new MSSM cmdlets, I ran into a couple of issues which took me awhile to figure out. The issue stems from the fact that you can not simply create some of the MSSM objects such as a Network or Compute Profile and then save the output to a variable for use with other CSSM cmdlets, which I found to be quite strange as that is one of the biggest benefit of PowerShell and being able to pipe objects between cmdlets. You have to perform a "GET" operation on the object that you had just created because the types returned are different between the New and Get cmdlets. In any case, here is a sample end-to-end workflow using the new MSSM cmdlets as I figured others may run into this problem scratching their head and the PowerCLI documentation was not very clear about this behavior, at least it was not apparent to me.

Automating HCX Add On for VMware Cloud on AWS

06/19/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

Enabling Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) for a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC is just a click of a button and is completely self-service which makes consuming the HCX Service extremely easy! All the hard work of deploying and configuring the required HCX infrastructure for your SDDC is completely automated for you by VMware when you click on "Deploy HCX" button.

Once the HCX infrastructure has been deployed in your SDDC, you can then deploy the respective HCX components for your on-premises vSphere environment which you can fully automate end-to-end which I have blogged about here.

Although the deployment of the HCX components for the SDDC is just click of a button, I recently had a need to automate this and I figure this would be a nice addition to my HCX PowerShell Community Module and complete the end-to-end story quite nicely from enabling the HCX Cloud Service to automating the deployment and configuration of the on-premises HCX components.