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New Nested ESXi 6.x Content Library 

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A few years back I had showed how you could create and host your own 3rd Party vSphere Content Library which allows customers to decouple their content from the underlying vSphere environment and centralizing their content and making it available to number of vCenter Servers by simply just having an HTTP(s) endpoint. The other huge benefit is being able to take advantage of the existing web content tools for optimizing delivery or retrieval whether that is replication, caching, etc. and not relying a single vCenter Server for providing Content Library publication. In addition to showing how to create your own content libraries, I also had built my own 3rd Party vSphere Content Library which contains a variety of my Nested ESXi Templates (empty VM shells) running on Amazon S3 which can be consumed by anyone as long as you are running vCenter Server 6.0 or newer.

Although the empty Nested ESXi Templates were quite useful for myself and customers, it would have also been nice to include my pre-built Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances which I had recently updated to support vSphere 6.0 Update 3 and vSphere 6.5d (vSAN 6.6). Thanks to Dana Nourie, who runs our wildly popular VMware Flings Program, was kind enough to help me with the content hosting and now anyone can also subscribe to my Nested ESXi VA's and automatically have the content sync down using the vSphere Content Library feature.

UPDATE 1 (07/31/17) - The Nested ESXi Content Library has been updated to include the latest ESXi 6.5 Update 1 VA. If you are already subscribing to the library, it should have already pulled down the content (or at least the metadata which you can then force synchronization) or you can simply subscribe to the library and have access to the latest ESXi VA.

UPDATE 2 (05/07/18) - The Nested ESXi Content Library has been updated to include the latest ESXi 6.5 Update 2 VA. If you are already subscribing to the library, it should have already pulled down the content (or at least the metadata which you can then force synchronization) or you can simply subscribe to the library and have access to the latest ESXi VA.

To get started, just create a new vSphere Content Library and enter the following subscription URL: https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/lib.json 


You can either download the content immediately or only when you need to use it. I recommend the former since its only two images which totals up to a whopping 1GB 😉

Once the creation of the Content Library has been completed, you should see the following two Nested ESXi VAs in the library which are now ready for deployment!


For more information about the Nested ESXi 6.0u3/6.5d VA's and how they work, please have a look at this blog post here. For more information about the Nested ESXi Templates and how to subscribe to the 3rd Party vSphere Content Library, please have a look at this blog post here.

Updated Nested ESXi 6.0u3 & 6.5d Virtual Appliances

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I finally found a bit of "extra" spare time to update my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances to support some of the recent releases of ESXi, 6.0 Update 3 and 6.5d, which enables customers to easily and quickly deploy vSAN 6.6 in their environment for testing, development or learning purposes. If you have not used this appliance before, please have a look at this article which goes into greater detail on how to deploy and use the Nested ESXi VA.

As part of this update, I also spent some time looking at all the feedback that I had received from the community since releasing the VA and I took this opportunity to also add some nice enhancements that folks have been asking about 🙂 Jump towards the bottom to see what's new. To reduce the number of VA's that I need to manage and due to usage, the following VA's have recently been decommissioned. I only plan on supporting the latest versions which you can find in the links below.

Decommissioned VA's:

  • ESXi 5.5 Update 3 (Nested_ESXi5.x_Appliance_Template_v2.ova)
  • ESXi 6.0 Update 2 (Nested_ESXi6.x_Appliance_Template_v5.ova)
  • ESXi 6.5 GA (Nested_ESXi6.5_Appliance_Template_v1.ova)

New VA's:

What's New:

  • Support for DHCP 
    • I know this might sound pretty basic but before you were required to specify a static IP (even if you had DHCP). By default, you no longer need to fill out the networking section as highlighted in yellow below.
  • Support for default root password
    • You no longer need to provide root password, it will default to the famous VMware1! The issue in the past was that I had randomly generated a password which I discarded and when the customization failed, it was very difficult to troubleshoot since I do not actually have the password 😉 Hopefully we do not have any other bugs, but this will make debugging easier and also reduce the amount of input if you want to quickly spin up an ESXi instance.
  • Support for VLAN ID
    • Though not a huge number of requests, there were still of you who asked for 802.1q (trunk) support on Management VMkernel interface. This is an optional field and obviously this is only applicable if you provide a static IP Address.
  • Automatic removal of Customization VIB
    • As some of you may or may not know, the way in which these OVF properties are processed within the Nested ESXi instance is a special firstboot script which reads in these values and then applies the ESXi customization. If everything is successful, there really is no use for this to exists further and although you could set a certain advanced setting to force re-customization, it was quicker to just re-deploy. With that in mind, the customization VIB is now automatically removed once its done its job. I have included a special debug option that would allow it to not be deleted in scenarios where there are issues and we need to take a look at the state of the system. With this change, you really now have a "vanilla" ESXi instance 🙂
  • Fixed dvFilter param for eth1


Hope you enjoy some of these new updates and happy Nesting!

Installing the Horizon View Agent on a Domain Controller

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A couple of weeks back, a fellow colleague needed to install the Horizon View Agent on a Microsoft Windows Domain Controller to be able to take advantage of the Direct Connect feature to efficiently connect into a lab environment. In general, this is not a recommended practice. In fact, by default the Horizon View Agent includes several pre-checks, one of which that prevents the installation if it detects the underlining system is a Domain Controller.

In this particular scenario, the Domain Controller was not being used for a real production environment but rather as part of a vPod that is hosted in a Hands-On-Lab type of environment. I could also see another use case where this might occur in personal home labs where you might consolidate several types of roles on a single Windows system and wish to be able to use the Direct Connect feature of the Horizon View Client.

The individual had searched extensively online but all the suggested command-line flags were not applicable to the Horizon View Agent. After pinging me for ideas, I reached out to a few of our End-User Computing folks and thanks to them, we found a neat little work around by tweaking the MSI installer.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk. There are no guarantees that the behavior described here will continue to function going forward and it can change without notice.

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Update on Intel NUC 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) & ESXi 6.x

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Intel just started shipping their i3 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) Intel NUCs and no surprise, Florian of virten.net has already gotten his hands on a unit for testing. The Intel NUCs is a very popular platform for running vSphere/vSAN-based home labs, especially for their price point and footprint. Last week, Florian discovered from his testing that the built-in network adapter on the 7th Gen NUC was not being detected by any of the ESXi installers and had published his findings here.

Since the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform for ESXi, it does not surprise me that these sort of things happen, even if the NUC had a pretty good track record going back to the 5th Gen releases. Nonetheless, I reached out to Florian to see if he can provide me with a vm-support bundle and see if there was anything I could do to help.

A couple of Engineers took a look and quickly identified the issue with the Kabylake NIC (8086:15d8) but before getting to the solution, I did want to clarify something. The Kabylake NIC is actually NOT an officially supported NIC for ESXi and although it currently shows up in the VMware HCL, it is a mistake. I have been told the VMware HCL will be updated shortly to reflect this, apologies for any confusion that this may have caused.

Ok, so the great news is that we do have a solution for getting ESXi to recognize the built-in NIC on the 7th Gen Intel NUCs. The semi-bad news is that we currently do not have a solution in the short term for any released version of ESXi, as the fix will require an updated version of the e1000e Native Driver which will only be available in a future update of ESXi. I can not provide any timelines, but keep an eye on this blog and I will publish more details once they are available.

In the meantime, if you already own a 7th Gen NUC, there is a workaround which Florian has already blogged about here which uses the USB Ethernet Adapter VIB for the initial ESXi installation. If you are planning to purchase the 7th Gen NUC and would like to wait for folks to confirm the fix, then I would recommend holding off or potentially looking at the 6th Gen if you can not wait. Thanks to Florian and others who shared their experiences with the 7th Gen NUC and also to the VMware Engineers who found a quick resolution to the problem.

UPDATE (07/27/17) - The updated e1000e Native Driver that was included in ESXi 6.0 Update 3 is now included in ESXi 6.5 Update 1 which just GA'ed. You should be able to install ESXi without require any additional modifications to the latest Intel NUCs.

UPDATE (02/24/17) - An updated e1000e driver which contains a fix for 7th Gen NUC is now available as part of ESXi 6.0 Update 3, below are several options in how you can consume the driver.

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USB 3.0 Ethernet Adapter (NIC) driver for ESXi 6.5

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I had several folks ask me about an updated USB 3.0 Ethernet Driver for ESXi 6.5, similar to what I had created for ESXi 5.5 and 6.0. There were some changes that came with ESXi 6.5 and thanks to Songtao, I was able to build a new driver. For those of you who are not familiar with this particular driver, I highly recommend you give this article here a read before proceeding any further. If you are interested in Realtek driver for ESXi 6.5, be sure to check out Jose's blog here for more info.

UPDATE (02/12/19) - A new VMware Native Driver for USB-based NICs has just been released for ESXi 6.5/6.7, please use this driver going forward. If you are still on ESXi 5.5/6.0, you can continue using the existing driver but please note there will be no additional development in the existing vmklinux-based driver.

UPDATE (04/23/18) - For folks who plan to upgrade or install ESXi 6.7, you can continue using the 6.5 driver. I've had several folks reach out and share there have not been any issues and upgrades will preserver the USB NIC driver or you can perform a fresh install and follow the steps below.

To use this new driver for ESXi 6.5, there are some additional steps that is required. Below are the instructions on how to install this on an ESXi 6.5 host.

Step 0 - Download the ESXi 6.5 USB Ethernet Adapter Driver VIB or ESXi 6.5 USB Ethernet Adapter Driver Offline Bundle and upload it to your ESXi host.

Step 1 - If you are upgrading from an existing ESXi 5.5 or 6.0 environment, the first thing you will want to do is uninstall the old driver by running the following command (specify the correct name of the driver):

esxcli software vib remove -n vghetto-ax88179-esxi60u2

Step 2 - Install the VIB by running the following ESXCLI command to install:

esxcli software vib install -v /vghetto-ax88179-esxi65.vib -f

Step 3 - Next, you will need to disable the USB native driver to be able to use this driver. To do so, run the following command:

esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=FALSE

Step 4 - Lastly, for the changes to go into effect, you will need to reboot your ESXi host. Once your system has rebooted, it should now automatically load the USB Ethernet driver and you should see your USB Ethernet Adapter as shown in the screenshot below.

esxi-6-5-usb-3-0-network-adapter-driver

Step 5 - ESXi does not natively support USB NIC and upon a reboot, the USB NICs are not picked up until much later in the boot process which prevents them from being associated with VSS/VDS and their respective portgroups. To ensure things are connected properly after a reboot, you will need to add something like the following in /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh which re-links the USB NIC along with the individual portgroups as shown in the example below.

You will also need to run /sbin/auto-backup.sh to ensure the configuration changes are saved and then you can issue a reboot to verify that everything is working as expected.

Virtual NVMe and Nested ESXi 6.5?

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After publishing my Nested ESXi enhancements for vSphere 6.5 article, I had received a number of questions on whether the new Virtual NVMe (vNVMe) capability introduced in the upcoming vSphere 6.5 release would also work with a Nested ESXi VM? The answer is yes, similiar to PVSCSI and VMXNET3, we also have an NVMe driver for ESXi running in VM.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

To consume the new vNVMe for a Nested ESXi VM, you will need to use the latest ESXi 6.5 and later compatibility (vHW 13). Once that has been done, you can then add the a new NVMe Controller to your Nested ESXi VM and then assign that to one of the virtual disks as shown in the screenshot below.

nested-esxi-65-nvme-1
Next, you would install ESXi 6.5 as you normally would and the NVMe controller will automatically be detected and driver will be loaded. In the example below, you can see I only have a single disk which ESXi itself is installed on and it is backed by the NVMe Controller.

nested-esxi-65-nvme-0
One of the biggest benefit of using an NVMe interface over the traditional SCSI is that it can significantly reduce the amount of overhead compared to the SCSI protocol which in turn consumes less CPU cycles as well as reducing the overall amount of IO latency for your VM workloads. Obviously, when using it inside of a Nested ESXi VM, YMMV but hopefully you should also see an improvement there as well. For those who plan to give this a try in their environment, it would be good to hear what type of use cases you might have in mind for this and if you have any feedback (good/bad), feel free to leave a comment.