vSphere

Supermicro E300-9D (SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP) is a nice ESXi & vSAN kit

11/23/2018 by William Lam 10 Comments

Supermicro kits such as the E200-8D is a very popular platform amongst the VMware community and with powerful Xeon-based CPUs and support for up to 128GB of memory, it is perfect for running a killer vSphere/vSAN setup!

Earlier this Fall, Supermicro released a "big daddy" version to the E200-8D, dubbed E300-9D and specifically, I want to focus on the 8-Core model (SYS-E300-9D-8CNTP) as this system actually listed on the VMware HCL for ESXi! The E300-9D can support up to half a terabyte of memory and with the 8-Core model, you have access to 16 threads. The E200-8D is also a supported platform by VMware, you can find the VMware HCL listing here.

I was very fortunate to get my hands on a loaner E300-9D (8-Core) unit, thanks to Eric and his team at MITXPC, a local bay area shop specializing in embedded solutions. In fact, they even provided a nice vGhetto promo discount code for my readers awhile back, so definitely check it out if you are in the market for a new lab. As an aside, when doing a quick search online, they also seem to be the only ones actually selling the E300-9D (8-Core) system which you can find here and in general, they seem to be priced fairly competitively. This is not an endorsement for MITXPC, but recommend folks to compare all prices when shopping online, especially as today is Black Friday in the US and Cyber Monday is just a few days away.

ESXi on the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini

11/09/2018 by William Lam 13 Comments

Thanks to the Green Mini Host (Apple Mac Mini hosting and collocation provider) who were the first to publicly confirm that latest release of ESXi (6.7 Update 1) works on the recently announced 2018 Apple Mac Mini.

Conforming @VMware #ESXi runs on the new Mac Mini 2018! #macmini2018 @vGhetto @lamw pic.twitter.com/DRqQ4lsWn5

— Green Mini host (@macminihost) November 7, 2018

For vSphere/vSAN Home Lab enthusiasts, the price of the new Mac Mini, especially when it is fully loaded is probably a tough sale. However, for customers developing on MacOS including iOS development, CI/CD, build farms, gaming, etc. which benefit from running on vSphere. For these customers, support for ESXi on the new Mac Mini is extremely interesting, especially with the updated hardware giving these systems a significant boost in performance even when comparing to the current Mac Pro 6,1 and iMac Pro models. In fact, I had number of folks ping me after Apple introduced it during their keynote asking if ESXi would work on the Mini's.

Disclaimer: Apple Mac Mini (both old and new) hardware are NOT officially supported by VMware. The only officially supported Apple hardware platform is the Mac Pro 6,1 or Mac Pro 5,1. For more details, please refer to VMware's Hardware Compatibility List.

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

11/02/2018 by William Lam 9 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