ESXi

ESXi on a Raspberry Pi

11/07/2018 by William Lam 28 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 (virtualized) (@WhatAintInside) November 6, 2018

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

11/02/2018 by William Lam 30 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.

Is vCenter Server & ESXi hosts using VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) or custom CA certificates?

10/23/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Customers have two primary methods of managing TLS certificates for their ESXi hosts, they can either use the built-in VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) which is part of vCenter Server or Custom CA Certificates. I will not go into the gory details, but you can read more about the options here in our documentation.

A question that I had received recently was whether you can determine the type of certificate an ESXi host was provisioned with and whether this could be programmatically retrieved using the vSphere API? The answer is yes. In vSphere 6.0, we introduced a CertificateInfo property which contains a number of fields including status, issuer, expiry and subject details and by inspecting either the issuer or subject property, you can determine the type of certificate on the ESXi host.

Here is a screenshot of the data using the vSphere MOB for an ESXi host that has VMCA-based certificate:

Here is a screenshot of the data using the vSphere MOB for an ESXi host that has custom CA certificate:

As you can see, for VMCA-based certificate the issuer's OU will have value of "VMware Engineering" and subject's emailAddress will have value of "vmca@vmware.com".

Quick Tip – How to enable vGPU vMotion in vSphere 6.7 Update 1

10/19/2018 by William Lam 10 Comments

Since this question has come up a few times this week, I thought it is worth a quick blog post on how to enable the new vGPU vMotion feature which is now available in latest vSphere 6.7 Update 1 release. If you try to vMotion a VM that has been configured with a vGPU, you see the following message stating vGPU hot migration is not enabled.

To enable vGPU vMotion, you just need to update the following vCenter Server Advanced Setting vgpu.hotmigrate.enabled to true using the vSphere UI. The change will go into effect immediately and you will now be able to vMotion a VM configured with vGPU. This setting is actually documented in the official vSphere documentation here, but from all the folks I spoke with, it looks like it never came up or it must have been missed.

In addition to vMotion support, you can also perform Storage vMotion & Cross vMotion (Compute & Storage) for vGPU enabled VMs. Make sure that both your vCenter Server and ESXi hosts have been upgraded to vSphere 6.7 Update 1 and that you have NVIDIA GRID hardware and VIB installed on ESXi host. For folks interested in learning more about the new vMotion features in vSphere 6.7 Update 1, be sure to check out the VMworld 2018 session What's New in vMotion Technical Deep Dive.

Lastly, for those that prefer to automate this configuration change, here is a quick PowerCLI snippet for enabling vGPU vMotion:

Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $global:DefaultVIServer -Name vgpu.hotmigrate.enabled | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value $true -Confirm:$false

All vSphere 6.7 Update 1 release notes & download links

10/16/2018 by William Lam 10 Comments

The highly anticipated vSphere 6.7 Update has officially GA'ed! Below is an aggregation of all the related release notes and downloads for this vSphere release. I have also created a short URL which you can use to access this exact same page using vmwa.re/vsphere67u1

The downloads are currently being staged, so please be patient.

vCenter Server 6.7u1

ESXi 6.7u1

vSAN 6.7u1