William Lam

ESXi on the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini

11/09/2018 by William Lam 2 Comments

Thanks to the Green Mini Host (Apple Mac Mini hosting and collocation provider) who were the first to publicly confirm that latest release of ESXi (6.7 Update 1) works on the recently announced 2018 Apple Mac Mini.

Conforming @VMware #ESXi runs on the new Mac Mini 2018! #macmini2018 @vGhetto @lamw pic.twitter.com/DRqQ4lsWn5

— Green Mini host (@macminihost) November 7, 2018

For vSphere/vSAN Home Lab enthusiasts, the price of the new Mac Mini, especially when it is fully loaded is probably a tough sale. However, for customers developing on MacOS including iOS development, CI/CD, build farms, gaming, etc. which benefit from running on vSphere. For these customers, support for ESXi on the new Mac Mini is extremely interesting, especially with the updated hardware giving these systems a significant boost in performance even when comparing to the current Mac Pro 6,1 and iMac Pro models. In fact, I had number of folks ping me after Apple introduced it during their keynote asking if ESXi would work on the Mini's.

Disclaimer: Apple Mac Mini (both old and new) hardware are NOT officially supported by VMware. The only officially supported Apple hardware platform is the Mac Pro 6,1 or Mac Pro 5,1. For more details, please refer to VMware's Hardware Compatibility List.

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2018 Europe Sessions

11/09/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

It has been less than 24 hours since VMworld Europe 2018 has concluded and the awesome VMworld team has already published most of the VMworld 2018 Europe session recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2018.

As of writing this, there are a total of 389 sessions with369 published with recordings. I have also posted some initial viewing statistics on the top 20 VMworld Europe sessions, huge congrats to the Chris and Daniel's ESXi on ARM session, I think it is going to be hard to beat this session (which I still need to watch myself :)). I will check back in a week or so in case more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Please enjoy, especially for those that were not able to attend VMworld this year.

Note: For those wanting to directly download the actual video files from github repo (browser or through automation), you will get an access denied. It turns out the client performing the download must include a referer within the request (which is automatically done for you when you click open the link in my github but not the case using wget/cURL or other tools. Below are a few examples on how to include the referer for automated downloads which has changed from VMworld US.

Here is wget example:

wget --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -O CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile CTO3509BE.mp4

In addition, I have also published eu.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.

ESXi on a Raspberry Pi

11/07/2018 by William Lam 19 Comments

During the closing of the VMworld Europe Keynote on Tuesday, Ray O'Farrell (CTO of VMware) had one more "tiny" surprise for our CEO, Pat Gelsinger 😉 He handed him a tiny little device called the Raspberry Pi (rPI) which was running a prototype version of ESXi! This was completely unexpected even for VMware Employees, especially as we had just announced our ESXi on ARM initiative at VMworld US. You can watch the keynote replay here starting at 1:37:15.

As you can imagine, this created a TON of excitement and buzz at the VMworld but it also sparked some interesting conversations on why VMware would even do this? Was this just a marketing gimmick or was there something more significant in showing that ESXi could run on a rPI?

Interested in @VMware #ESXi on @Arm? Want to understand the VMware Edge vision? See Alex and Regis at the Virtualization at the Edge booth, in the #IoT and Edge Zone at #VMworld2018 in Barcelona! pic.twitter.com/qGO3AO76JD

— It's an Arm world (@WhatAintInside) November 6, 2018

Update on running ESXi on Intel NUC Hades Canyon (NUC8i7HNK & NUC8i7HVK)

11/02/2018 by William Lam 4 Comments

The Intel NUC is one of the most popular and affordable hardware platform for running vSphere and vSAN Home Labs. For customers that want a bit more computing power, Intel also has their Skull Canyon platform which was released back in 2016 and has also gained in popularity amongst VMware Home Labbers. To be clear, the none of the Intel NUC platforms are on VMware HCL and therefore are not officially supported.

Earlier this year, Intel released their second generation of their higher-end Intel NUCs dubbed Hades Canyon which comes in two flavors NUC8i7HNK and NUC8i7HVK, with the latter being the higher-end unit. Based on the previous generation of hardware, most customers assumed ESXi should just work and went out and purchased the lower-end "HNK" version just to find out that was not case. The ESXi Installer would boot up to a certain point and then stop with the following error:

“Shutting down firmware services…..

Using “simple offset” UEFI RTS mapping policy”

To add to the confusion, this issue was not observed with the higher-end NUC8i7HVK model which was also quite interesting. Over on the nucblog.net, they also confirmed ESXi runs fine on "HVK" model and the issue seems to be isolated to the lower-end "HNK" model.

Retrieving Apple hardware details (Model, Serial, Board & EFI Boot ROM & SMC Version) from ESXi

10/31/2018 by William Lam 2 Comments

For customers who run ESXi on Apple Hardware, retrieving the Apple hardware specific information such as the Board ID, EFI Boot Room and SMC Version for troubleshooting or auditing purposes can be challenging. Historically, this information is only available when running the hardware with an Apple MacOS operating system and customers would have to either boot the system into the MacOS Recovery Mode to run the system profiler tool from the command-line or install a full blown MacOS operating system to retrieve the necessary information as outlined in this Apple KB.

For some customers, this may not even be an option as Apple hardware does not provide any remote management capabilities and customers must physically be in front of the system to perform this process and imagine needing to do this across a fleet of Apple servers.

While working on a recent case with a customer, I was curious if the Apple specific information could be retrieved from within ESXi and remove the need to boot into MacOS? I reached out to one of the Engineers, Darius Davis, who I work with on a frequent basis when it comes to MacOS-related topics to see if this was possible.

Automating Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Manager initial configuration for VMC

10/29/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

Following up from my previous Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Automation article which looked at deploying the HCX Manager OVA, this article will now focus on automating the initial configuration of HCX Manager including the registration to HCX Cloud which will enable the on-prem HCX Manager to be used with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). Once HCX Manager is up and running, customers can configure the system using the HCX VAMI interface which is available on port 9443 via the UI or in our case with the HCX VAMI APIs.

I have updated my HCX PowerShell Module to include 8 additional functions that can be used for initial configuration of HCX Manager:

Set-HcxVCConfig
Set-HcxLicense
Get-HcxNSXConfig
Set-HcxNSXConfig
Get-HcxLocation
Set-HcxLocation
Get-HcxRoleMapping
Set-HcxRoleMapping
Get-HcxProxy
Set-HcxProxy
Remove-HcxProxy