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 🙂
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.