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Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances are now back under VMware Flings Community!

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I know many of our internal teams (field, engineering, support, etc.), customers and partners have heavily relied on my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances (VA) over the years which makes it seamless to deploy both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) lab environments for learning, testing, troubleshooting, automation and development purposes. To support our customers in troubleshooting and prototyping purposes, I also make use of my Nested ESXi VAs on a regular basis and have found this to be invaluable in aiding my day to day work.

As part of the VMware by Broadcom "Day 2" transition, the hosting platform that housed my Nested ESXi downloads was no longer available and that impacted both the standalone Nested ESXi downloads but also the Nested ESXi Content Library, which provided a convenient way to subscribe to all the VAs from your vCenter Server.

Today, I excited to share that my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance downloads are back and they are now available under the VMware Flings program! 🥳

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Updating handshakeTimeoutMs setting for ESXi 7.x & 8.x using configstorecli

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With the introduction of the ESXi Configuration Store back in vSphere 7.0 Update 1, all ESXi configuration changes should be managed using either the configstorecli for an individual ESXi host or leveraging the new vSphere Configuration Profiles (VCP) for scale with vCenter Server.

For certain ESXi hostd configurations such as configuring the handshakeTimeoutUs property, which has changed locations from several locations including /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml and /etc/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg to now /etc/vmware/rhttpproxy/config.xml in the latest ESXi 8.x release, it can be challenging to figure out the correct configstorecli syntax.

Having spent some time playing with the configstorecli, I was able to quickly help a customer recently who was looking to update the handshakeTimeoutUs property for ESXi 7.x and I wanted to make it easy for folks to find the syntax for both ESXi 7.x and 8.x.

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Tips for navigating and downloading from new Broadcom Support Portal

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The Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) is most likely a new interface for many including myself after the planned VMware by Broadcom Day 2 Transition, which was completed on May 6th, 2024. The BSP is used for more than just support, it is the single place for managing your entitlements/licenses, software downloads, trials, security advisories, knowledge base articles and engaging with the community.

Tip: I have also put together a list of Useful Links for VMware by Broadcom Day 2 Transition in case you have not seen this handy resource.

Note: I know some users are still reporting entitlement issues, you can reach out to support or contact your account team who may be able to assist if you are still unsure. I know several users reported entitlements were finally in their account towards the end of last week, so it may just take a bit longer than expected. I have also seen some of the links on BSP throw 404, but after refreshing it once more, it loads and this might be due to some residual issues with our new CDN provider, CloudFlare.

It definitely took me the whole week to get familiar with the BSP, especially knowing where and how to find things, which was not always the most intuitive. I have been compiling some notes and various tidbits that I have learned over this past week and I wanted to share this in case it can help our customers, partners and colleagues to quickly ramp up on using the BSP.

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