vSphere 6.7 Update 1

Heads Up – Apple Mac Pro 6,1 fails to boot after upgrading to ESXi 6.7 Update 1

11/16/2018 by William Lam 6 Comments

We had a number of customers report that after upgrading their Apple Mac Pro 6,1 to the latest ESXi 6.7 Update 1 release, the system failed to boot and the following error was seen on the console:

Shutting down firmware services...
Mutiboot buffer is too small.
Unrecoverable error

A few customers made the observation that this was in result of a newer version of the Apple Firmware that was included in the Mac Pro 6,1 systems which seemed to have cause this problem. In addition, this also impacts brand new installations of ESXi 6.7 Update 1 on new Mac Pro 6,1 that includes a newer version of the Firmware. At this time, is it NOT recommended to upgrade to ESXi 6.7 Update 1 if you are running the Mac Pro 6,1. A request has already been made to the VMware HCL team to remove Mac Pro 6,1 for ESXi 6.7 Update 1 and hopefully should be reflected by later this evening.

Note: This issue can also affect the Apple Mac Mini, which is not an officially supported platform for ESXi.

In the mean time, VMware has published KB 59660 which provides a workaround that may help customers who have upgraded their Mac Pro 6,1 to ESXi 6.7 Update 1 to rollback to the previously installed version of ESXi. Please refer to the KB for more details and you can subscribe to the article for future updates regarding this issue.

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

All vSphere 6.7 Update 1 release notes & download links

10/16/2018 by William Lam 10 Comments

The highly anticipated vSphere 6.7 Update has officially GA'ed! Below is an aggregation of all the related release notes and downloads for this vSphere release. I have also created a short URL which you can use to access this exact same page using vmwa.re/vsphere67u1

The downloads are currently being staged, so please be patient.

vCenter Server 6.7u1

ESXi 6.7u1

vSAN 6.7u1

VSAN Managed Object Browser (MOB) in vSphere 6.7 & vSphere 6.7 Update 1

09/10/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

If you have ever spent any time using the vSphere API, you probably have heard of or have used the vSphere Managed Objected Browser (MOB) which is an extremely useful learning and debugging tool when working with the vSphere API. The vSphere MOB is accessed through a web browser connecting to either vCenter Server or ESXi and provides a graphical interface, allowing you to discovery/explore the underlying vSphere API and its data in a very intuitive manner.

As an avid user of the VSAN Management API since its release, I have always wanted something similar, especially when I first got started. I was quite happy when I found out in vSphere 6.7 and VSAN 6.7, the VSAN team has added a VSAN MOB interface directly on ESXi, for the VSAN specific APIs that are available only on an ESXi host. Just like the vSphere MOB which is also available on ESXi host, it is disabled by default and must be enabled.

The following ESXCLI commands can be used to enable/disable the VSAN MOB on ESXi 6.7:

esxcli vsan debug mob start
esxcli vsan debug mob stop

However, when I tried to enable the VSAN MOB, I ran into the following error message:

hostname 'localhost.localdomain' doesn't match '192.168.30.10'

It turns out there is an issue where it fails to match the IP Address of the ESXi host to the default localhost.localdomain and hence it fails to start the VSAN MOB. This issue is fixed in the upcoming vSphere & VSAN 6.7 Update 1, but in the mean time, there is a workaround.