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How to enable passthrough for USB Network Adapters claimed by ESXi CDCE Driver?

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As part of vSphere 7.0, ESXi now ships with a USB CDCE (Communication Device Class Ethernet) driver which can benefit customers with SB network adapters that support the CDCE specification as shared in this blog post HERE. This can especially be useful for those running a VMware Homelab where the onboard network adapter may not be supported and using a CDCE USB network adapter would allow you to install ESXi.

When a CDCE-supported USB network adapter is connected to an ESXi host, it will automatically be claimed by the CDCE driver as shown in the screenshot below.


If you are planning to use the USB network adapter for VMkernel traffic, then there is no workflow change like any other physical network adapter. However, if you intend to passthrough the USB network adapter to a VM, then you may find that it is not working as expected.


The reason for this is that ESXi has already claimed the USB device, assuming you wish to use it for VMkernel traffic. To change the behavior for a particular CDCE-supported USB network adapter, we just need to apply a USB Quirk which tells ESXi to ignore this adapter.

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Self-Contained & Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment using new VLC Holodeck Toolkit

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I recently came to learn about a really neat solution that was released called the VMware Cloud Foundation Lab Constructor (VLC) Holodeck Toolkit, which makes it super easy for anyone to deploy a complete functional VCF environment, fully self-contained and deploys all the required networking and infrastructure services that dramatically reduces the amount of time and effort to deploy a VCF environment for evaluation or learning purposes.

What is unique about the VLC Holodeck Toolkit is that it ships with a special vPodRouter VM, which provides all the networking and connectivity that is required to deploy a typical production VCF environment. If this sounds familiar, this is exactly how VMware Hands-On-Labs (HOL) works where isolated networking is provided to each "vPod" through their vPodRouter VM. In addition, the VLC Holodeck Toolkit also builds a custom Windows Jumphost (bastion) ISO that includes all the infrastructure services like DNS, Directory, Certificate Authority, etc. that is fully configured and ready to use once it is deployed and this is how users interact with the VCF environment.

With the VLC Holodeck Toolkit providing and building all the necessary "virtual" infrastructure, the barrier to entry is further reduced and customers can easily stand up a fully functional VCF environment running on just a single ESXi host without any special physical networking requirements. For a detailed overview of the solution, check out overview video below.


After learning about the solution, I also had the opportunity to kick the tires and provide some early feedback, which included a few additional optimizations that made its way back into the toolkit. For those interested, below is the high level workflow to go from a single ESXi host with minimal configuration to a fully functional VCF environment.

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ESXi configstorecli enhancement in vSphere 8.0 Update 1

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The ESXi configstorecli was introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and provides access to the ESXi ConfigStore which responsible for centrally managing all configurations for an ESXi host instead of relying on different methods including a variety of configuration files, I highly recommend reviewing this refresher article HERE if you have not heard of the configstorecli before. The ESXi ConfigStore is also the underlying infrastructure that powers the new vSphere Configuration Profile feature which is also part of the vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) solution.

For those who currently or plan to automate ESXi installations using Kickstart, I wrote an article HERE last year on how to start converting some of your existing automation into using the new ESXi configstorecli, which is another article I recommend folks take a look if you have no already.

One of the challenges that I personally found when using configstorecli was purely figuring out the overall schema for the different components, groups and keys that are available. While I have demonstrated how to traverse the configstore in this blog post HERE, I still found experience less than ideal. I would have liked a bit more of an iterative exploration of the configstore itself and rather than showing the entire schema, I could slowly expect each node as configstore is a stored as a JSON document.

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