esxi 6.7

Automatically retrieve CVE CVSS score for all ESXi security bulletins

07/20/2018 by William Lam 9 Comments

I always enjoying learning new things, especially when it is outside of my immediate domain expertise and if I can thrown in some Automation to help solve a solution, it is a win for everyone. I bring this up because, yesterday I had noticed an interesting question from one of our field folks where their customer is looking to implement a process for applying ESXi security patches to help determine compliance timeline (e.g. when a specific security update will be applied to infrastructure).

To do this, the customer would like to use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score which ranges from 0-10, 0 being low and 10 being high. The CVSS score is part of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) which is also referenced for every ESXi security patch (bulletin) that is published by VMware. The question that came up was how easily it would be to determine the CVSS score for a given ESXi security patch. First, I will outline the "manual" process and once that is understood, I will demonstrate an automated solution which customers can take advantage of to easily retrieve this information for all ESXi security patches.

Leveraging Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 for extremely fast Nested ESXi provisioning

05/17/2018 by William Lam 4 Comments

The idea of "Instant Cloning" a Nested ESXi VM (running ESXi in a VM) is not a new concept. In fact, I had shared a solution back in 2015 using the private VMFork APIs. However, what has changed is the ease of consumption, primarily due to the re-architecture of Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 (more details here and here) which resulted in a public and simplified API. Some of you might ask, why not simply clone a Nested ESXi VM or create a Link Clone? What benefit would I get by using Instant Clone?

The answer is not only speed, but the fact that the instantiated VM is fully operational and ready to start executing where as a traditional full clone or linked clone requires a full OS boot up that can take up to several minutes to deploy and configure. This may not sound like much for a small number of Nested ESXi VMs, but as you increase the number of instances, Instant Clone really shines while still maintaining speed and the instant availability of the VM. As you can imagine, this definitely opens up for some interesting use cases whether it be for personal home lab or educational purposes like VMware HOL. In addition, we also have customers who deploy Nested ESXi not only at high scale but also with a high churn rate for development purposes, think CI/CD type of a workload who can also benefit from Instant Clone.

So how fast are we talking about? Lets say you wanted to test out the latest version of VSAN in vSphere 6.7, you would normally deploy 3 Nested ESXi VMs, power them up and wait for them to be ready on the network. With Instant Clone, you can deploy three fully functional Nested ESXi VMs in just 30seconds! As the VMs are instantly available for consumption, you can start the VSAN enablement workflow immediately and even parts of that can be baked into the Instant Clone workflow. With the ease of provisioning Nested ESXi VMs, you can simply maintain a catalog of ESXi templates which are in "frozen" states and then leverage Instant Clone to deploy just-in-time Nested ESXi environments and discard them once you are done. Pretty slick if you ask me! and something I plan on using going forward.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi is still not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.

New Instant Clone Architecture in vSphere 6.7 – Part 2

04/30/2018 by William Lam 3 Comments

In the previous article, I provided an overview of the new "Parentless" Instant Clone feature which was introduced in vSphere 6.7 and some of the architectural differences between prior versions of Instant Clone. In this post, I will show you how to use the new Instant Clone feature, which is currently only available with the vSphere API.

There are two important parts when using Instant Clone:

A user defined script which runs within the GuestOS and is responsible for customizing the network identity of the Instant Clone. This script is not just limited to network configurations but can also be used to customize other OS and/or application settings.
The deployment script which runs outside of the GuestOS and instantiates new Instant Clones using the vSphere API. This script is responsible for passing in data (network configuration, OS and/or application settings) to the GuestOS which can then be accessed directly by the user defined script running within each Instant Clone for actual customization.

To demonstrate the use of the Instant Clone API, I will be using PowerCLI and have also created an Instant Clone PowerCLI module called InstantClone.psm1. However, the API is not limited to just PowerCLI and can be consumed using any of the new vSphere 6.7 SDKs. For our example, we will be exercising the creating Instant Clones from a "Frozen" Source VM workflow since that is the most efficient method, especially as you scale to larger number of Instant Clones. For those that wish to experiment with the other workflow of creating Instant Clones from a "Running" Source VM, feel free to take a look at the previous post for the required steps.

For my setup, I will be using an Ubuntu Server 16.04 system as my Source VM and I will create 30 Instant Clones from this system. Each Instant Clone will immediately be available for use and will be fully customized and reachable from a network perspective (e.g. unique IP and MAC Address). Here is a screenshot of one of my deployments to give you an idea of how blazing fast Instant Clone is 🙂

Here is a short video that I just recorded that demos the Instant Clone APIs using PowerCLI (this demo is using an Ubuntu VM configured with 2GB memory where as the original screenshot was 1GB)

Demo of Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 from lamw on Vimeo. [Read more...] about New Instant Clone Architecture in vSphere 6.7 – Part 2

VM Creation Date now available in vSphere 6.7

04/27/2018 by William Lam 7 Comments

Last year, I wrote about a new Virtual Machine API property called createDate which provides customers a method of retrieving the original creation date and time of a VM. This vSphere API was first introduced in VMware Cloud on AWS and with the release of vSphere 6.7, it is also now available for on-premises customers to consume.

I know this is a feature that many customers have been asking for (including myself) and I am super happy to finally see this information automatically captured and persisted as part of the VM configuration. Customers no longer have to query the vCenter Server Events API to retrieve this information and store it externally, since it can be rotated out and basically lost due to your vCenter Server Events retention configuration. As of right now, the VM creation date is only available using the vSphere API, it is currently not available in the vSphere H5 Client and hopefully I will be able to convince PM to add this useful piece information into the UI as well!

The createDate property is located under VirtualMachine->Config and can be accessed using any one of the supported vSphere 6.7 Automation SDKs which also includes PowerCLI (you will need to install PowerCLI 10.1.0 which enables support for vSphere 6.7)

Here is an example of retrieving the createDate for a VM named esxi67-01:

(Get-VM -Name esxi67-01).ExtensionData.Config.createDate

Here are a few things to be aware of regarding the createDate behavior:

BOTH vCenter Server and ESXi hosts must be upgraded to 6.7 to make use of the new API
This API is available on both vCenter Server as well as ESXi hosts running 6.7
Only new VMs that were created after upgrading to 6.7 will include this property with the creation date
VMs that were created prior to upgrading 6.7 will not have their original creation date, but rather a default value of 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z. If ESXi hosts have not been upgraded but vCenter Server has, then the API property will be unset (null)
You can programmatically check whether an ESXi host supports the new createDate property by querying its capabilities using the vSphere API. Here is a PowerCLI example:
(Get-VMHost -Name 192.168.30.10).ExtensionData.Capability.VmCreateDateSupported

VMs created in a vSphere 6.7 environment can be Cross vCenter vMotion to other non-vSphere 6.7 environments and migrated back while retaining its original createDate value. This is done so by storing the value in the extraConfig property of a VM (this is best effort support and we recommend only migrating to vSphere 6.7 or newer environments)

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

04/25/2018 by William Lam 13 Comments

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

New Instant Clone Architecture in vSphere 6.7 – Part 1

04/24/2018 by William Lam 6 Comments

Instant Clone or VMFork (as it is referred internally) has been around for a number of years now. It was initially available as part of vSphere 6.0 with the primary consumer being Horizon View and their just-in-time desktop solution. Although Instant Clone was part of the core vSphere platform, public APIs were not available for external consumption. Many customers were interested in the technology to enable other non-VDI use cases such as Dev/Test, Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) and even Container workloads. Part of the reason for not exposing the API was partially due to the original Instant Clone architecture which has certain limitations and constraints.

In addition, VMware was also interested in getting feedback from customers on how they would like to consume Instant Clone from an Automation standpoint, this was important because the current workflows were also some what complex. This started out with the release of a PowerCLI Instant Clone Extension Fling that provided an abstraction on top of the private APIs. Based on that and other feedback, VMware followed that up by releasing Instant Clone for pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) Fling which gave customers more programmatic access to the private APIs. Both Flings were a huge success and we even had customers using the pyvmomi Instant Clone modules in Production to deploy several hundred Instant Clone VMs per day for their CI/CD workloads.

Taking the learnings from both Horizon View and the feedback from customers using the Flings, the Instant Clone Product/Engineering team has been hard at work behind the scenes on simplifying the Instant Clone architecture and removing limitations and constraints that had existed in earlier versions. As you can imagine, this was a non-trivial amount of work that would need to be released in phases, especially as VM lifecycle management touches almost every part of the vSphere stack. The team really focused on ease of consumption, especially from an Automation standpoint which is how most customers prefer to consume Instant Clone.