virtuallyGhetto

William Lam

Quick Tip – How to disable the vCenter Server Update Notification banner?

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I received this question on Twitter from Andreas asking the following:

When a new vCenter Server update is available, a notification banner is automatically displayed in the vSphere UI. This functionality was introduced as part of vSphere 7.0 and part of the new vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) capability. This is a very useful feature since administrators spend most of their time in the vSphere UI and when new update was available, it would only be displayed in the VAMI UI, which most folks were not logging into on a regular basis.


Today, the update notification banner is always displayed and there is no way to temporarily disable it. This can be annoying if you do not intend to update your vCenter Server immediately and I assume this is why Andreas was asking about either postponing or disabling the notification all together.

Currently, the only way I am aware of for disabling this notification is to actually disable the vCenter Server Life-Cycle Manager Remote Plugin itself. You can do this by navigating to Administration->Solutions->Client Plugins and then selecting "vCenter Server Life-cycle Manager" and click on the Disable button. You can refresh the webpage or logout and you should no longer see the notification banner.

Disclaimer: By disabling the vCLM plugin, you are disabling more than just the banner but all vCenter vLCM functionality including Interop and Update Planner capabilities. If these are things you require, do not disable the plugin.


I can certainly see a nice feature enhancement in the future where vLCM notifications can be postponed or deferred to a later date. I will share this blog post and feedback with the vLCM PM for consideration.

ESXi 7.0 Update 2 enhancement for USB NIC only installations

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The USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling has been an extremely popular Fling that has allowed customers to easily add additional networking capabilities by using a supported USB-based network adapter even though ESXi traffic over USB networking is not officially supported.

In most deployments, the USB network adapter is usually a supplement to the existing onboard network adapter of a system. However, there have been scenarios where the onboard network adapter is either not available or functional and customers would still like to be able to install ESXi and have it running over just the USB network adapter.

Although installing ESXi using just a USB network adapter is possible today, one downside is that an additional workflow is needed to fix the network binding after installing ESXi.

During the interactive ESXi installation, you will see the following error at 81% which will cause installer to get stuck

Exception: No vmknic tagged for management was found.

At this point, the installer has completed and you need to switch to the console (Alt+F1) and perform a reboot. Once ESXi reboots, you will need to go into the DCUI and manually bind the vusb0 interface for ESXi management for connectivity. To persist this USB NIC binding, you will need to add small snippet of code as outlined here.


Obviously, this was not an ideal user experience and I personally had to use this workaround on several occasions, especially for newer hardware platforms where the onboard network adapter may not be recognized by ESXi and being able to use the USB Network Fling definitely came in handy.

With the release of ESXi 7.0 Update 2, we have improved the user experience for installing ESXi with just a single USB NIC. This enhancement was added by Songtao after mentioning the undesirable behavior. A new ESXi kernel boot option called usbBusFullScanOnBootEnabled can be added which removes the need for the workaround mentioned above. This new kernel option forces a full bus scan to claim all USB NICs that are attached since USB device claiming is slow compared to PCIe devices.

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Aquantia/Marvell AQtion (Atlantic) driver now inbox in ESXi 7.0 Update 2

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Last spring, VMware and Aquantia (now part of Marvell) collaborated and delivered their first ESXi Native Driver for their AQtion (Atlantic) based 10GbE network adapters. This new driver was primarily focused on enabling network connectivity for ESXi when running on either an Apple 2018 Mac Mini (8,1) and Apple 2019 Mac Pro (7,1) that included the 10GbE networking option. Consequently, this driver also benefited the broader VMware Community as it enabled additional 10GbE networking through a number of Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE network adapters that customers could now take advantage in their VMware environments.

With all these benefits, VMware has decided to inbox the Aquantia/Marvell driver with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 2 release, so that customers no longer had to create a custom ESXi Image Profile that included the driver, which was always required when installing ESXi on either the Apple Mac Mini or Mac Pro that were configured with the 10GbE networking option. For a complete list of supported Aquantia/Marvell AQtion based network adapters, please see the VMware HCL.

Here is a screenshot of an earlier release of ESXi 7.0 Update 2 running on the 2018 Mac Mini which now automatically recognizes the 10GbE network adapter out of the box.

How to clean up stale vSphere Container Volumes & First Class Disks?

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If you are running and deploying Kubernetes (K8s) which includes vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), you might notice vSphere Container Volumes showing up in the vSphere UI under the Monitor tab for a given vSphere-based Datastore. This is normal and expected as new Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) are being requested as part of deploying K8s-based application that require storage.


Typically, when PVs and PVCs are no longer needed, they should be cleaned up within the K8s layer via kubectl either automatically or manually depending on your provisioning process. When you delete a K8s Cluster, these PVs/PVCs are not automatically cleaned up and its for good reason, you may want to reuse them and the way vSphere supports this is by implementing them as First Class Disks (FCD), which means they are lifecycle independent of a VM.

What happens when the K8s Cluster has been deleted and you actually want to clean up these stale FCDs, how do you go about doing that? This is a question I have seen come up more frequently and there are a few options.

Option 1:

If you happen to be on vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (which was just released yesterday), the vSphere UI has been enhanced to allow users to now delete vSphere Container Volume (see screenshot above). Previously, you could only view the FCDs and reapply a storage policy.

Option 2:

Since vSphere Container Volumes are just FCDs and we have FCD APIs, we can use the API to retrieve information as well as clean them up. The easiest way is to use PowerCLI's Get-CnsVolume and Remove-CnsVolume cmdlets.

Here is an example of deleting the 2GB volume:

Get-CnsVolume -Datastore (Get-Datastore "sm-vsanDatastore") -Name "pvc-db6829ad-e1a9-46e8-ace3-7e7c18187a0d" | Remove-CnsVolume

In the case of standalone FCDs, which could have been manually provisioned or through a backup solution, you can also clean them up by using PowerCLI's Get-VDisk and Remove-VDisk cmdlets respectively:

Get-VDisk -Name "fill-me-in" | Remove-VDisk

ESXi 7.0 Update 2 Upgrade Issue – Failed to load crypto64.efi

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I started to notice yesterday that a few folks in the community were running into the following error after upgrading their ESXi hosts to latest 7.0 Update 2 release:

Failed to load crypto64.efi

Fatal error: 15 (Not Found)

UPDATE (03/13/2021) - It looks like VMware has just pulled the ESXi online/offline depot and has updated KB 83063  to NOT recommend customers upgrade to ESXi 7.0 Update 2. A new patch is actively being developed and customers should hold off upgrading until that is made available.

UPDATE (03/10/2021) - VMware has just published KB 83063 which includes official guidance relating to the issue mentioned in this blog post.

Issue

It was not immediately clear to me on how folks were reaching this state and I had reached out to a few folks in the community to better understand their workflow. It turns out that the upgrade was being initiated from vCenter Server using vSphere Update Manager (VUM) and applying a custom ESXi 7.x Patch baseline to remediate. Upon reboot, the ESXi host would then hit the error as shown above.


Interestingly, I personally have only used Patch baselines for creating ESXi patches (e.g. 6.7p03, 7.0p01) and never for major ESXi upgrades. I normally would import the ESXi ISO and create an Upgrade baseline. At least from the couple of folks I spoke with, it seems like the use of Patch baseline is something they have done for some time and has never given them issues whether it was for a patch or major upgrade release.

Workaround

I also had some folks internally reach out to me regarding this issue and provided a workaround. At the time, I did not have a good grasp of what was going on. It turns out the community also figured out the same workaround, including how to recover an ESXi host which hits this error as you can not just go through recover workflow.

For those hitting the error above, you just need to create a bootable USB key with ESXi 7.0 Update 2 ISO using Rufus or Unetbootin. Boot the ESXi 7.0 Update 2 Installer and select the upgrade option which will fix the host.

To prevent this from happening, instead of creating or using a Patch baseline, create an Upgrade baseline using ESXi 7.0 Update 2 ISO. You will first need to go to Lifecycle Manager Management Interface in vCenter Server and under "Imported ISOs", import your iage.


Then create ESXi Upgrade baseline and select the desired ESXi ISO image and use this baseline for your upgrade.


I am not 100% sure, but I believe the reason for this change in behavior is mentioned in the ESXi 7.0 Update 2 release notes under "Patches contained in this Release" section which someone pointed me to. In any case, for major upgrades, I would certainly recommend using Upgrade baseline as that is something I have always used even when I was a customer back in the day.

VCSA 7.0 Update 2 Upgrade Issue – Exception occurred in install precheck phase

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Like most folks, I was excited about the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 2 and I was ready to upgrade my personal homelab, which was running on vSphere 7.0 Update 1c. However, after starting my VCSA upgrade in the VAMI UI, it quickly failed with the following error message: Exception occurred in install precheck phase

Given the release had just GA'ed less than an hour ago and everyone was probably hammering the site, I figured I would wait and then try again.

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