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How to simulate Persistent Memory (PMem) in vSphere 6.7 for educational purposes? 

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A really cool new capability that was introduced in vSphere 6.7 is the support for the extremely fast memory technology known as non-volatile memory (NVM), also known as persistent memory (PMem). Customers can now benefit from the high data transfer rate of volatile memory with the persistence and resiliency of traditional storage. As of this blog post, both Dell and HP have Persistent Memory support and you can see the list of supported devices and systems here and here.


PMem can be consumed in one of two methods:

  • Virtual PMem (vPMem) - In this mode, the GuestOS is actually PMem-aware and can consume the physical PMem device on the ESXi host as standard, byte-addressable memory. In addition to using an OS that supports PMem, you will also need to ensure that the VM is running the latest Virtual Hardware 14
  • Virtual PMem Disks (vPMemDisk) - In this mode, the GuestOS is NOT PMem-aware and does not have access to the physical PMem device. Instead, a new virtual PMem hard disk can be created and attached to a VM. To ensure the PMem hard disk is placed on the PMem Datastore as part of this workflow, a new PMem VM Storage Policy will be applied automatically. There are no additional GuestOS or VM Virtual Hardware requirement for this scenario, this is great for legacy OS that are not PMem-aware

Customers who may want to familiarize themselves with these new PMem workflows, especially for Automation or educational purposes, could definitely benefit from the ability to simulate PMem in their vSphere environment prior to obtaining a physical PMem device. Fortunately, this is something you can actually do if you have some additional spare memory from your physical ESXi host.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Unlike a real physical PMem device where your data will be persisted upon a reboot, the simulated method will NOT persist your data. Please use this at your own risk and do not place important or critical VMs using this method.

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vYetti – Fun animated vSphere Login UI customization

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For those that have been asking about how to customize the vSphere Client Login UI to include this fun little animated login screen as shown below, you can find the complete instructions on my github repo: https://github.com/lamw/vyetti-vsphere-client-customization

I wanted to take a moment and give thanks and credit to the original author (Darin S) who created the animated login, which he referred to as an "Animated SVG Avatar". I remember seeing this on my Twitter stream a few months back where it was shared on codepen.io, which is a platform for web developers to easily show off their demos. From what I could gather, the original demo had used MorphSVGPlugin.min.js which is a Javascript library that provided the animation. Apparently, the use of this library required a membership which prevented anyone from consuming this outside of codepen.io for demo purposes. While searching online, I accidentally stumbled across another similiar project by Balram Chavan who developed an alternative solution simply using Angular 5. With Balram's solution, I was able to make the necessary minor modifications (thanks to Jeeyun from the Clairty team on helping me with some of my Anuglar questions) to get this fully incorporated into the vSphere Client UI. I am sure there are other improvements that can be made to the customization such as a more "clarity" look/feel as the old the old "blue marge" theme background is pretty dated but I will leave that to someone more creative than me 🙂

Native MAC Learning in vSphere 6.7 removes the need for Promiscuous mode for Nested ESXi

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Over the years, several solutions have been developed here and here to help reduce the impact of promiscuous mode, which is a requirement for running Nested ESXi as a workload. Although these solutions worked extremely well, it however did require users to install additional software to enable this functionality. The most recent solution was a new Learnswitch VMkernel module (released as a VMware Fling) that enables MAC learning capabilities on ESXi.

Today, I am pleased to announce that with the release of vSphere 6.7, the MAC Learning functionality is now available as a native feature of the VMware Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS) and as some of you may have guessed from the title, promiscuous mode is also no longer a requirement for running Nested ESXi! I wanted to take a moment and thank Subin, Jobin, Sriram, Rajeev & Samuel from our Network and Security Business Unit (NSBU) at VMware who worked tirelessly to get this integrated and productized into ESXi. Not only will this benefit Nested ESXi workloads but also other solutions and use cases that have historically required the use of promiscuous mode. For customers who are still running ESXi 6.0 or 6.5, you should continue to use the Learnswitch Fling until you fully upgrade to vSphere 6.7.

To use the new MAC Learning functionality, you will of course need to upgrade to vSphere 6.7 (both vCenter and ESXi) but also upgrade to the latest VDS version which is 6.6. MAC Learning can be enabled on a per Distributed Virtual Portgroup bases and today, it is only available when using the vSphere API. For those that have used the VDS API to manage their VDS, you will simply use the existing ReconfigureDVPortgroup_Task() method and in 6.7, there now a new macManagementPolicy property which allows you to enable and define your MAC Learning settings. This new MAC Management Policy will also be the new preferred method for managing security policies going forward for a DV Portgroup and the previous security policy settings should no longer be used.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi is still not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.  [Read more...] about Native MAC Learning in vSphere 6.7 removes the need for Promiscuous mode for Nested ESXi

Nested ESXi 6.7 Virtual Appliance Updates

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I know many of you have been pinging me the last couple of days for an updated Nested ESXi 6.7 Virtual Appliance and I have just finished my strict quality control process 🙂 The only minor change with the 6.7 appliance is the VM is now configured with EFI Firmware, where as in the past it was set to BIOS. As of vSphere 6.5+ appliances, the customization scripts are automatically removed by default which means that customers can turn on Secure Boot feature post-deployment without having to perform any manual workarounds. In addition, you will find a few more updates related to the updated ESXi appliance below. I hope you enjoy these free resources to help learn and plan for your vSphere 6.7 upgrades, Happy Friday!

Note: These solutions are all developed during off hours and does take a considerable amount of time/effort to manage and update. Although they are provided to you as a free solution, the development itself is not 🙂

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Nested ESXi 6.7 Appliance:

ESXi 6.7 Virtual Appliance (Nested_ESXi6.7_Appliance_Template_v1.ova)

Nested ESXi Content Library

If you are using my Nested ESXi Content Library, I have updated it to include the latest 6.7 Appliance. Simply refresh your Content Library to automatically pull down the image or you can create a new Content Library by subscribing to the following URL: https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/lib.json For more details, please take a look at this blog post here.

vGhetto vSphere Automated Lab Deployment:

For those that use my vGhetto lab deployment script to automate a fully functional vSphere environment, I have created a new version of the script to support vSphere 6.7 which you can find more details here. One neat feature that was suggested by Christian Mohn awhile back was the ability to get more insights to what is happening during the VCSA deployment since the verbosity can be quite distracting on the primary screen. There is now a new $enableVerboseLoggingToNewShell variable that is enabled by default to spawn a new PowerShell console that will watch the VCSA installer logs, so you have a better idea of what is going on.

Can the VCSA 6.5 forward to multiple syslog targets?

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I had a couple folks ping me recently asking whether the latest vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 release supports forwarding to multiple syslog targets? Currently today, only a single syslog target is officially supported which can be configured using the VAMI UI. I know this is something our customers have been asking about and I know this is something the VC Engineering team is considering.

Having said that, it is possible to configure additional syslog targets on the VCSA, but please be aware this is not officially supported. A couple of these customers understood the support impact and were still interested in a solution as some of their environments mandated multiple redundant syslog targets and using a syslog forwarder/relay was not an option for them.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

When configuring syslog forwarding from the VAMI UI, the configurations are all written to /etc/vmware-syslog/syslog.conf on the VCSA.

With this information, if we want to add additional targets (which can be of the same configuration or different), you simply append additional targets to the syslog configuration file. For example, if I have two syslog targets 192.168.30.110 and 192.168.30.111 and I wish to use the default log level, TCP and 514, I would use the following:

Once you have saved your changes, you will need to restart the rsyslog service for the change to go into effect. To do so, run the following two commands on the VCSA:

systemctl stop rsyslog
systemctl start rsyslog

One additional thing to note is that the VAMI UI will only show the very last syslog target within the configuration file but if you monitor syslog servers, you will see that logs are indeed being forward to all servers that have been configured in the syslog configuration file.

“Shockwave Flash has crashed” workaround for vSphere Web (Flash) Client

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On Saturday, I started to notice that logins to the vSphere Web (Flex) Client stopped working with Google Chrome. Upon a successful logon, it would immediately crash with "Shockwave Flash has crashed" message. I had seen this message plenty of times in the past and usually restarting Chrome would resolve the problem but this time it looked to be persistent even after a system reboot.

I took to Twitter to see if I was the only one hitting this issue since I was not able to find anything on the web and literally in minutes, I had several dozen replies with folks experiencing the same issue which apparently started several days ago but like most, including myself, thought it was an isolated event.

After a bit of back/fourth and a few other folks chiming in, it looks like Google actually went and published a newer version of Flash (27.0.0.170) with latest Chrome (61.0.3163.100) update. This newer Flash version is not even available for download and the current version as listed on Adobe's website should be 27.0.0.159. This issue not only affects VMware products that uses Flash but any website that has Flash content and I had also noticed few others sharing frustrations on Twitter for other flash-based websites.

Luckily, one workaround that I had found which others have also confirmed is to switch to Firefox which currently does not have this issue Its also been reported that latest updates from Firefox is also distributing the latest Flash which causes the exact same issue. Like most, Chrome is my default browser and it was annoying that I had to switch to another browser but that was the only way I could access the content I needed. Earlier this evening, I was looking at the VMware Reddit Channel and noticed a thread had popped up regarding this exact issue and it looks like more and more folks are now noticing.

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