virtuallyGhetto

vSphere 7

Heads Up – Nested ESXi crashes in ESXi 7.0 running on older CPUs

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Thanks to Patrik Kernstock, who works in our Technical Support organization at VMware, for making me aware of an issue related to Nested ESXi running on an ESXi host that has been upgraded to ESXi 7.0. Several folks in the community have noticed after upgrading their Intel NUC 7th Gen and deploying a Nested ESXi VM and powering on an inner-guestOS would causes the Nested ESXi VM to crash.

Upon further investigation, it looks like this is not specific to the Intel NUC platform but rather with a specific generation of CPUs which are Intel Sky Lake-based and as a result, some customers are noticing this affect on their 7th Gen NUC.

The good news is that this issue has already been reported and we should have a fix in a future update of ESXi. In the meantime, you can still run Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization on these affected CPUs, you just will not be able to power on inner-guest VMs. Big thanks to Patrik for helping out with the testing and triaging this internally.

Automated vSphere 7 and vSphere with Kubernetes Lab Deployment Script

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I know many of you have been asking me about my vSphere with Kubernetes automation script which I had been sharing snippets of on Twitter. For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work making the required changes between the vSphere 7 Beta and GA workflows, some additional testing and of course documentation. Hopefully the wait was worth it (I think it is) and if you enjoy the script or have benefited, please consider adding 🌟to the Github repo to show your support! Thanks and enjoy

The Github repository:

Before getting started, please carefully read through the requirements section along with the complete sample end-to-end execution if you are new to vSphere with Kubernetes. You will need to have a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 license before you can get started and specifically an NSX-T Advance license which is one of the required parameters within the script. If you do not have access to a VCF 4 license, I strongly recommend taking part in the recent VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy effort which I had started to easily get access to the latest VMware releases along with a nice 15% discount!

The script supports deploying both a standard vSphere 7 environment with just VCSA, ESXi and vSAN as well as the complete solution which includes NSX-T to support vSphere with Kubernetes. For more details, please refer to the FAQ.

New vCenter events for vSphere 7, VMware Cloud on AWS 1.10 and vSphere with Kubernetes

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Last year I published a Github repo which lists all the vCenter Server Events for a default installation for both vSphere 6.7 Update 3 and VMware Cloud on AWS 1.9. Since every vSphere environment is going to be unique with various 2nd and 3rd party solutions, I have also included a small PowerCLI script in the blog that you can use to generate the list of events for your own deployment.

With the release of vSphere 7 and VMware Cloud on AWS 1.10, I thought it was time to update the repo to see what's new which can be useful in a number of scenarios including using these events with the popular vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling.

One thing worth pointing out with the introduction of vSphere with Kubernetes in vSphere 7, is there are also specific vCenter events, a total of 23 that are available and I am sure more will come in the future. Below is a quick summary which is also included in the Github repo.

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Really cool updates with OVFTool 4.4 and support for vSphere 7

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vSphere 7 has officially GA'ed this morning and with folks starting to download ESXi and the vCenter Server Appliance, do not forget about all the supporting tools such as the latest PowerCLI 12.0 release which includes a number of enhancement as well as the various vSphere Management and Automation SDKs.

One of my most frequently used tools on a daily basis, some times even more than PowerCLI is OVFTool which is now at version 4.4 which officially supports vSphere 7 but it also includes a number of really awesome enhancements and bug fixes. 

While looking over the OVFTool release notes, I noticed a few interesting tidbits that I thought was worth calling out:

OVF Tool now can upload disk files to the host in parallel, and download disk files from the host in parallel. OVA is unsupported. Parallelism is limited by the number of CPUs. See the --parallelThreads=N option in the OVF Tool User's Guide for details.

This is a most welcome feature for customers with extremely large VMs where upload and/or downloads of OVAs can take a considerable amount of time as only a single CPU thread is used. With this feature, you can now enable multiple CPU threads with the --parallelThreads parameter which should really with performance! Even for smaller size VMs, you can still benefit if you have additional CPU resources to allocate and something I will be using going forward!

For multi-disk virtual machines, OVF Tool now includes the --multiDatastore flag to specify datastore per disk. See the OVF Tool User's Guide for details.

This is another welcome feature for customers where you might have an OVA that contains multiple VMDKs and want to explicitly place them on specific datastore.

The ARM64 architecture on Linux is now supported.

Finally, I thought this was very interesting to see that OVFTool has been ported over to ARM64 for Linux which means we can run now run OVFTool on a Raspberry Pi or even an Amazon A1 EC2 Instance! This might come handy in the future and I wonder if OVFTool for ESXi would be the next logical step? 🙂

I highly recommend you check out the rest of the release notes as it contains many more enhancements and fixes, many of which I have reported from the community and/or by our customers. I think this is certainly one of the tools you can upgrade immediately as it has great backwards compatibility with older vSphere releases but you can also take advantage of all the new features mentioned above immediately. If there are other OVFTool improvements or enhancements you really would like to see, feel free to leave a comment along with the use case and I will past that on to Engineering.

Homelab considerations for vSphere 7

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With the vSphere 7 Launch Event just a few days away, I know many of you are eager to get your hands on this latest release of vSphere and start playing with it in you homelab. A number of folks in the VMware community have already started covering some of the amazing capabilities that will be introduced in vSphere and vSAN 7 and I expect to see that ramp up even more in the coming weeks.

One area that I have not seen much coverage on is around homelab usage with vSphere 7. Given this is a pretty significant release, I think there are some things you should be aware of before you rush out and immediately upgrade your existing homelab environment. As with any vSphere release, you should always carefully review the release notes when they are made available and verify the hardware and its underlying components are officially on the VMware HCL, this is the only way to ensure that you will have a good and working experience.

Having said that, here are just a few of the observations that I have made while running pre-GA builds of vSphere 7 in my own personal homelab. This is not an exhaustive list and I will try to update this article as more information is made available.

Disclaimer: The following considerations below is based on my own personal homelab experience using a pre-GA build of vSphere 7 and it does not reflect any official support or guidance from VMware. Please use these recommendation at your own risk.

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