WilliamLam.com

Considerations for future vSphere Homelabs due to upcoming removal of SD card/USB support for ESXi

by // 16 Comments

In case you have not heard the news, VMware had recently published a new knowledge base article (KB 85685) outlining details for the future removal of SD card/USB as a standalone boot device for ESXi.

If you have not read the KB, please take a few minutes and carefully read the article, especially as you think about future hardware upgrades and purchases.

There has certainly been no shortage of discussions and debates since the publishing of the VMware KB. One topic that I know many of you have been wondering and asking about is what is the impact to vSphere Homelabs? This was something that had already crossed my mind after I first read the KB and I was thinking about this a bit more this week and specifically some of the potential options that are available to customers right now but also some of the considerations you may want to account for in with future homelab upgrades.

Disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions and do not reflect any official guidance or recommendations from VMware.

[Read more...]

Custom webhook function to publish events into VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

by // Leave a Comment

In my previous article, I demonstrated how you can leverage the upcoming v0.7 release of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) to publish and consume custom events to easily extend your event-driven automation to other event sources. As a recap, this is accomplished by constructing and sending a conformant CloudEvent to VEBA, which can then be consumed by your functions.


This is perfect for external event sources that can create a custom HTTP payload that conforms to the CloudEvent specification, however not all solutions have this type of functionality or flexibility. An alternative solution to this is to simply create a VEBA function that can accept a custom payload and then handle the transformation of the data into a valid CloudEvent and then forward that off to broker running within VEBA. This is just one of the many benefits of Knative, the backend for VEBA, where each function deployment includes an endpoint that is automatically served as a subdomain to the VEBA hostname (e.g. https://my-function.NAMESPACE.VEBA-FQDN)


This solution would enable external "Event Producer" to send a non-CloudEvent payload which can then be processed by your function and re-publish as a conformant CloudEvent that can then be consumed by other function and services.

  1. Event Provider would make HTTP request to the function webhook with a custom payload
  2. A conformant CloudEvent payload is constructed by the webhook function
  3. Webhook function will then forward the CloudEvent internally to the VMware Event Broker Appliance
  4. VEBA functions can now react to these custom CloudEvents

[Read more...]

Victron Venus OS on ESXi-Arm

by // 14 Comments

Over the weekend I received an interesting inquiry from a customer who had been playing with the ESXi-Arm Fling and wanted to know if it could run Victron Venus OS? I had never heard of Venus OS before, but a quick search online lead me to the company called Victron Energy which produces and sells various types of electrical chargers and they also have their own operating system to manage their software called Venus OS:

Venus OS is the software running on our Cerbo GX monitoring system, as well as its predecessors the Color Control GX, Venus GX and more. Also, it is in the GX versions of our MultiPlus-II  and EasySolar-II inverter/chargers.


Venus OS can be installed on a Raspberry Pi (rPI) and the customer attempted to run it as a VM using ESXi-Arm on rPI using the techniques shared here and here but found that it was unable to boot with a message stating no kernel installed.

Given this was beyond my skillset, I pinged Cyprien, who works on ESXi-Arm at VMware to see if he had any ideas? In less than 30 minutes, he not only found out the reason the previous techniques could not be used but also came up with a quick workaround. Venus OS is a 32-bit OS and is not based on Debian and this is why you can not simply boot using the Debian Installer. The solution requires a custom Arm64 linux kernel that includes UEFI support to be built and installed to be able to boot Venus OS running as a VM on ESXi-Arm. For more information, please see the detailed instructions below and big thanks to Cyprien for his help over the weekend!

[Read more...]