vSphere

Disabling vSphere with Tanzu does not delete NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) Service Engine (SE) VMs

03/31/2021 by William Lam Leave a Comment

While working on some automation to deploy a vSphere 7.0 Update 2 environment that has been configured with vSphere with Tanzu and NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB), I noticed that when you disable Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster, the two NSX ALB Service Engine (SE) VMs were still left behind.

It turns out that this behavior is due to a default setting within NSX ALB that will NOT automatically delete the SE's in the case there is a scaled up event which would then cause a re-deploy to happen. Instead, by default it is configured to wait 120 minutes (2hrs) before cleaning up.

If you wish to change this behavior, you can login to NSX ALB UI and navigate to Infrastructure->Service Engine->Advanced and update the "Delete Unused Service Engines After" to your desired value. Please note, that the shortest time interval to wait is 1 minute and if you set it to 0, it means the SE's VMs not be deleted.

After saving this change, the next time you disable Workload Management, the SE VMs will automatically get cleaned based on the time interval you had configured.

Adding a customized notification banner in the vSphere UI

03/18/2021 by William Lam 1 Comment

I was recently reminded of an old vCenter Server feature called Message of the Day (MOTD) that I had used quite extensively when I was a customer to easily communicate upcoming patch windows, downtime, updates and other interesting news to my internal users. Back in the day, the vSphere UI was known as the VI Client (C# Client or Thick Client) and once the MOTD is configured, users logging in would see this this custom notification banner across their UI Client.

It has been ages since I had used vCenter's MOTD feature but after sharing this tidbit on Twitter yesterday, I found a mix of folks that were still using this awesome feature including a VMware Cloud on AWS use case to that helped them easily identify a particular environments to users who was just learning about this feature for the first time.

Used this in @vmwarecloudaws to easily identify different environments e.g. Sandbox from Production https://t.co/bu2eaGMJw6 pic.twitter.com/6dMNb940Gb

— Mark McGilly (@MarkMcG_Bel) March 17, 2021

In addition to bringing some awareness to this oldie but goodie feature of vCenter Server, I also wanted to share some details on how you might automate this as I had a few questions about this on Twitter.

Here is a screenshot of my vSphere 7.0 Update 2 environment which has been configured with an MOTD and you can see that it can also properly render emojis, so you can certainly have some fun here 🙂

To configure an MOTD, click on the vCenter Server inventory object and then navigate to Configure->Settings->Message of Day and set or disable the message.

For those that wish to configure the MOTD programmatically, you can do so using the vSphere API with your favorite vSphere SDK of your choice including PowerCLI. You will need to use the UpdateServiceMessage() method which is part of the SessionManager object.

If you wish to view or check whether an MOTD is configured, the following PowerCLI snippet can be used:

Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $global:DefaultVIServer -Name vpxd.motd | select Value

However, to configure the MOTD, you can NOT use the Set-AdvancedSetting cmdlet as the advanced setting is a read only value and you must use the vSphere API directly.

Using PowerCLI, here is how to view the current MOTD:

$sm = Get-View $global:DefaultVIServer.ExtensionData.Content.SessionManager
$sm.Message

Using PowerCLI, here is how to update/change the MOTD:

$motd = "🚨This is William Lam's environment, it is NOT supported. Use at your own risk 😎"
$sm = Get-View $global:DefaultVIServer.ExtensionData.Content.SessionManager
$sm.UpdateServiceMessage($motd)

Easily create custom ESXi Images from patch releases using vSphere Image Builder UI

03/01/2021 by William Lam 5 Comments

Creating a custom ESXi Image Profile that incorporates additional ESXi drivers such as the recently released Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling or Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling is a pretty common workflow. Due to the infrequency of this activity, many new and existing users sometime struggle with the process to quickly construct a new custom ESXi Image Profile. I personally prefer to use the Image Builder UI that is built right into the vSphere UI as part of vCenter Server.

There are a couple of ways to create a custom new ESXi Image Profile using the Image Builder UI, but the easiest method is to use the Clone workflow, which is especially helpful when you are selecting an ESXi patch release as your base image.

With a regular major release, you only have to deal with two image profiles: standard (includes VMware Tools) and no-tools (does not include VMware Tools).

With an ESXi patch release, you actually have four image profiles: standard (includes VMware Tools + all bug/security fixes), security standard (includes VMware Tools + security fixes only), security no-tools (does not include VMware Tools + security fixes only) and no-tools (does not include VMware Tools + all bug fixes)

If you start with an empty custom image profile and then select your ESXi base image, you will notice there are multiple VIB version packages to select from since patch release you had imported earlier actually contains four different ESXi image profiles. Below are a step by step instructions on using the cloning workflow since this is a question I get from users who run into package conflicts not realizing they have selected the same package multiple times.

VMware customer production use cases for Intel NUC

02/19/2021 by William Lam 3 Comments

The Intel NUC also known as the Next Unit of Computing is a very popular platform for running VMware based homelabs. I have been working with the Intel NUCs since 2016 with their 6th Generation model when I decided to rebuild my personal home lab. Since then I have continued my efforts to ensure that vSphere continues to run extremely well on this amazing little platform even if it is not officially supported by VMware, which now also includes the latest 11th Generation (Tiger and Panther Canyon NUCs).

At the end of last year, I came across this fascinating Intel NUC documentary that was put together by Robtech, which I highly recommend a watch.

While listening to some of the use cases that SimplyNUC had observed over the years which has spanned land ⛰️, air 🛫, sea 🛳️ and space 🚀, it got me thinking about some of the use cases that I had come across while talking to our VMware customers.

Disclaimer: The Intel NUC is not officially supported by VMware and therefore they are not listed on the VMware HCL

A common misconception is that Intel NUCs are only useful for homelab purposes and has no place for running production workloads, which is just simply not true. Here are some of the common use cases that I have seen over the years, most of which are deployed at the Edge/ROBO:

vSphere Development/Testing, Education and Training
Retail, Grocery, Industrial Factories and Ships
Build Automation (CI/CD)
Telco/NFV (e.g. Network/Hardware monitoring)
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

I also wanted to take this opportunity and to share some of the stories on how some of our customers have taken advantage of this platform, even though it is not officially supported by VMware and some of the underlying business drivers. Hopefully these stories will educate, resonate and perhaps even inspire other customers to explore different computing platforms, especially at the Edge where constraints and requirements will differ quite significantly when compared to a typical Enterprise Datacenter.

If you would like to share your story of how you are using Intel NUC and VMware for production, feel free to reach out using the contact page.

ESXi on 11th Gen Intel NUC (Panther Canyon) & (Tiger Canyon)

01/13/2021 by William Lam 52 Comments

The highly anticipated 11th Generation Intel NUCs based on the new Tiger Lake processors has just been announced by Intel and I am excited to share my first hand experience with this new NUC platform. There are currently two models in the new 11th Gen lineup: the Intel NUC 11 Performance codenamed Panther Canyon (pictured on the left) which is the successor to the 10th Gen (Frost Canyon) NUC and the Intel NUC 11 Pro codenamed Tiger Canyon (pictured on the right) which is the successor to the 8th Gen (Provo Canyon) NUC.

There are a number of new improvements and capabilities that will make these new NUCs quite popular for anyone looking to build or upgrade their vSphere environment in 2021.

Before diving right in, I must say I love the new aesthetic look of the NUC chassis. In previous versions, the lid had a glossy and shiny finish, which easily left hand prints. These new models now have a clean matte finish. The NUC 11 Performance has a smoother feel compared to the NUC 11 Pro which has more of a texture to the finish, which I personally prefer. The other noticeable change is the power adapter, which is now half the size now which is nice for those looking to have several of these new kits sitting next to each other.

UPDATE (02/17/21) - The Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling has been released and is required for ESXi to recognize the new onboard 2.5GbE network adapter on all Intel NUC 11 models

Which VM was this vSphere VM cloned from?

01/11/2021 by William Lam Leave a Comment

This was a question that I saw back in December on the VMware {code} Slack which was quickly answered by the always awesome Luc Dekens. The solution is to look at vCenter Server Events, which are super rich in information and can be used for a number of things including identifying the source VM that it was cloned from. When I was a customer, this was something I did all the time, using events for auditing purposes but also identifying who, what and when a certain operation was performed including source VMs for cloning operations.

Although this information maybe known to some, there is still not an elegant solution that can help someone quickly identify the source VM for a specific vSphere VM that was cloned. This topic also intrigued me as I have seen this question come up in the past. I figure I might as well add this to my random scripting backlog and take a look when I had some time.

Before taking a look at the solution, it is important to understand the different types of clones that exists in vSphere today and also the respective vCenter Server events that can help us correlate to both the source VM but also the specific clone type.

Cloning Types

Full Clone - An independent copy of a virtual machine that shares nothing with the parent virtual machine after the cloning operation. Ongoing operation of a full clone is entirely separate from the parent virtual machine
Linked Clone - A copy of a virtual machine that shares virtual disks with the parent virtual machine in an ongoing manner. This conserves disk space, and allows multiple virtual machines to use the same software installation
Instant Clone - An independent copy of a virtual machine that starts executing from the exact running state of the source powered on virtual machine. Instant Clone uses rapid in-memory cloning of a running parent virtual machine and copy-on-write, simliar to that of Linked Cloning to rapidly deploy virtual machines