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Custom ESXi "Dummy" Reboot VIB for vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)

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A few weeks back, I had a request from one of our Technical Adoption Managers (TAM) that their customer wanted to create a custom ESXi VIB that could be used with vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) and would only require the ESXi host to reboot as part of the remediation.

This might sound like a strange request but I suspect the customer was either building out some automation for vLCM or simply getting more hands on with vLCM without applying any changes, which is great because its predecessor, vSphere Update Manager (VUM) will be removed in a future major release of vSphere.

While the customer was able to create a custom VIB by following the instructions in my recent blog post for building a custom VIB for ESXi 8.x, I did noticed that their descriptor.xml did not properly set the live-install-allowed and live-remove-allowed options which controls whether an ESXi host should reboot after installing and removing a VIB from the host respectively.


Since vLCM only works with offline bundles, we actually need to create an offline bundle with our custom ESXi VIB that vLCM can import. To further complicate things, starting with vSphere 7.x, a proper offline bundle that can be imported into vLCM requires the use of components rather than bulletins, which is what VUM previously had used.

With the assistance of the vLCM Engineering team, I was able to create my own "Dummy" ESXi VIB/Offline Bundle that is compatible with both vSphere 7.x and 8.x, which can be used directly by a standalone ESXi host via ESXCLI or imported and lifecycle using vLCM.

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Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) host commission using ESXi Kickstart

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ESXi Scripted Installation (Kickstart) has been my go-to method for achieving zero-touch provisioning of ESXi hosts at scale, which I had started using back in the ESX 2.5 days when I was a customer! Having worked at some very larger enterprises, I got the opportunity to experience and manage a variety of environments for automated ESXi provisioning.

For more than a decade, I have written hundreds of articles about ESXi kickstart and how it can help solve a variety of use cases stemming from my own background to some of the unique requirements that have come up from some of our largest VMware customers. To date, some of my favorite ESXi kickstart solutions includes my 2014 blog post in automating VM deployments using a USB device which became the basis for my USB to SDDC project in 2017.

While playing with the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1 Holodeck release (currently in Beta), I was thinking about the current VCF host commissioning workflow, which is a multi-step process after an ESXi host has been provisioned where you need to manually (or using automation) to add the hosts to SDDC Manager before they can be consumed for either expanding and/or deploying a new workload domain.

I thought, why could we not just skip this step all together and that was when I had the idea of just incorporating the VCF host commissioning workflow automatically as part of an ESXi Kickstart installation! 😀

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Pre-release Microsoft OS/2 2.0 on ESXi

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While catching up on my RSS news feed over the weekend, I came across an interesting article titled: Ancient pre-release version of OS/2 2.0 discovered, released in VM-friendly packages and of course the VM-friendly packages caught my attention but I had never heard of or used OS/2 before.

From the article, a software archaeologist known as Neozeed shared a pretty unique experience of installing a pre-release version of Microsoft and IBM OS/2 2.0 ...

A software archaeologist known as Neozeed recently shared a pre-release version of OS/2 2.0, an ambitious PC operating system that Microsoft and IBM were developing together in the 1990s before the former decided to pursue the Windows route.

and this was made possible with the use of the free version of VMware Workstation Player, where they had attributed to the speed of Workstation Player:

VMware is incredibly fast, it's the #1 reason why I had done this.

which I thought was a really cool shoutout for VMware Desktop Hypervisor team!

Neozeed also published a complete video for installing and configuring Microsoft OS/2 using Workstation Player for those intersted:

While I do use VMware Fusion for my macOS desktop, I was curious if the OS/2 VM could also run in ESXi (hint: it does) and wanted to see what the steps would be to run this piece of history on the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 2b release 🙂

Step 1 - Download the Internet Archive OS/2 Workstation VM image that was created by Neozeed

Step 2 - Create a new MSoS2-6.78 directory under your ESXi datastore and upload all files (except for the VMDK, it may fail if you are using vSAN storage like I am)

Step 3 - SCP the MSOS2-6.78.vmdk into the same directory where the rest of the configuration files

Step 4 - Next, we need convert the desktop hypervisor VMDK format to one that ESXi by running the following command in the ESXi Shell:

vmkfstools -i MSOS2-6.78.vmdk -d thin MSOS2-6.78-NEW.vmdk

Step 5 - Register the OS/2 VMX file and then attach the newly created VMDK and finally power on the VM!


Note: For the best desktop experience, connect to OS/2 VM using the Standalone VMRC Client.