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Quick Tip - HTTPs now supported with wget on ESXi 7.0

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This morning I needed to install the USB Network Native Driver Fling for ESXi and realized that offline bundles can not be installer over a remote URL. I figure I would download it directly to my ESXi host using wget. As soon as I hit the enter key to send the command I quickly remember that this will fail as the version of wget in the ESXi Shell does not support HTTPs. To my surprise, it actually worked! ?

[root@nuc:~] wget https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/USBNND/ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-34491022-component-15873236.zip
Connecting to download3.vmware.com (184.29.106.37:443)
ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-F 100% |**************************************************************************************************************************************************************************| 341k 0:00:00 ETA

This looks to be an enhancement in ESXI 7.0 and you no longer will get the "bad address" error when specifying an HTTPs URL as shown in the example below when running against the latest ESXi 6.7 Update 3 release.

[root@esxi67:~] wget https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/USBNND/ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-34491022-component-15873236.zip
wget: bad address 'download3.vmware.com'

Thank you to the Engineer who fixed this, this was a very pleasant and welcome surprise that I know will also be helpful to folks who automate using ESXi Scripted Installations.

Updating the VSAN HCL & Release Catalog DB using VSAN API

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Both the VSAN Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and the VSAN Release Catalog database which provides VSAN build recommendations should be updated periodically to ensure that you have the latest VSAN recommendations from VMware. In addition to using the vSphere UI to perform these update, customers can also automate either of these tasks using the VSAN Management API which can be consumed using any of the supported VSAN Management SDKs including PowerCLI.


I recently had a question about which VSAN API to use to update VSAN Release Catalog.

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Full OVA/OVF property support coming to Terraform provider for vSphere

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Terraform is one of the most popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool out there today and it should come as no surprise there is Terraform provider for vSphere which many of our customers have been using. In fact, VMware just recently released a couple more new providers (here and here) supporting VMware Cloud on AWS and NSX-T solutions respectively.

Although I have used Terraform and the vSphere provider in the past, it has not been my tool of choice for automation as it still lacks a number of basic vSphere capabilities which I require on a regular basis. The most common one being the ability to deploy a Virtual Appliance (OVA/OVF) which has been my biggest barrier and I know this has been a highly requested feature from the community as well.

In early May of this year, I noticed that v1.18 of the vSphere provider finally added support for OVA/OVF deployment and I was pretty excited to give this a try and may even have been the first to kick the tires on this feature? Although OVA/OVF support was added, it looks like support for customizing OVF properties which is commonly included as part of an OVA/OVF would only possible if you are cloning from an existing imported OVA/OVF image. One of the most common use case is to import an OVF/OVA from either your local computer or from a URL and it looks like this use case was not possible.

I filed two Github issues, one for supporting OVF properties for initial OVA/OVF deployment and another regarding a bug I ran into when importing OVA/OVF from a remote URL. Just yesterday, I got the good news that my feature request has been completed and I was given an early drop of the vSphere provider to try out this feature. I may have also hinted to the Engineering team to use my popular Nested ESXi Appliance OVA as a reference test implementation as I knew this was something many customers will want to deploy 🙂

UPDATE (11/05/21) - Thanks to Ryan Johnson, it looks like there has been some changes to the Terraform Provider for vSphere in how to deploy OVF/OVA. I've gone ahead an updated the example below to reflect these changes, it certainly looks a bit more verbose than before, which is a bit unfortunate from readability standpoint.

UPDATE (06/23/20) - Support for OVA/OVF properties is now available as part of 1.20 of the Terraform Provider for vSphere

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