William Lam

How to run Qemu & KVM on ESXi?

09.17.2014 by William Lam // 4 Comments

Last week I was asked whether ESXi could run the KVM hypervisor as a Virtual Machine (often referred to as Nested Virtualization). I personally have not used KVM before or run it on top of ESXi, but I have heard of many folks successfully virtualizing KVM as a Virtual Machine on top of ESXi. I figure since I have already written several articles on Nesting VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen on top of ESXi, I might as well also take a look at KVM!

Disclaimer: Nested Virtualization is not supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

As mentioned already, I have not used KVM before and one thing I wanted to understand before trying to run it as a Virtual Machine is what the difference is between Qemu and KVM as I have heard both these terms used in-conjunction before. I found this post to be quite helpful in helping me understand the differences between Qemu, KQemu and KVM. I recommend a read if you are new to Qemu or KVM like I am.

From the article above, we now see that you can run either Qemu as a standalone system or KVM which is an accelerator that runs on top of Qemu. With this, I will now demonstrate how you can run Qemu as well as KVM as Virtual Machine on top of ESXi. In the example below, I have selected the latest Ubuntu release (14.04.1) to run both Qemu and KVM.

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Quick Tip - Automate the enabling of the Customer Experience Improvement Program (vTelemetry) in VCSA

09.16.2014 by William Lam // 4 Comments

The VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program is a new feature that was introduced with the latest release of vCenter Server 5.5 Update 2 (vCenter Server for Windows & the VCSA). This feature provides the following per the documentation:

If you choose to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (Program), VMware receives anonymous information to improve the quality, reliability, and functionality of VMware products and services. VMware wants to understand better your vSphere deployment and business needs, and improve VMware response to customer requirements. You can choose to participate in the Program for vSphere at any time.

In my opinion, this has been needed for quite some time now. If you have ever installed any consumer based software, there is usually an option that allows customers to provide basic telemetry data back to the vendor so that they can better understand how the product is being used and more importantly leverage that data to help improve the product and features future.

The process of collecting basic telemetry (sometimes also known as phone home) is not a new concept in the Enterprise. In fact, for those of you who manage a storage array, this has been a standard practice for many many years now where every night, the storage array sends back a variety of telemetry data that may include performance information, utilization, logs, etc. to the vendors HQ. This data is then analyzed and the vendor maybe able to sport trends of a potential issue and proactively alert customers to take action before a problem even arises. Michael White has also recently written about the topic here which I recommend a read as well.

There are four categories of data that is being collected:

esxcfg-info.xml
Extension.json
AboutInfo.json
performance-stats.txt

If you wish to learn more about what is being collected and how to view the data before it is sent, please take a look at the documentation here.

One thing I had noticed when deploying the latest VCSA 5.5 Update 2 is that there is now an option to enable the Customer Experience Improvement Program and of course I was interested in automating this configuration as part of my VCSA deployment script.

Taking a look at the logs, I found that there is a new option that has been introduce in /usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg called telemtry:

Telemetry data collection modes:
read         : read and return the current status of the collector
enable       : enables the telemetry data collection
disable      : disables the telemetry data collection

To enable the Customer Experience Improvement Program as part of the VCSA setup, you must enable it after vpxd (vCenter Server) has started. Here is the modified VCSA configuration shell script:

#!/bin/bash

echo "Accepting EULA ..."
/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg eula accept

echo "Configuring Embedded DB ..."
/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg db write embedded

echo "Configuring SSO ..."
/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg sso write embedded

echo "Starting VCSA ..."
/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg service start

echo "Configuring VC Telemetry ..."
/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg telemetry enable

If you decide not to enable this feature during the initial deployment or if you have upgraded from an existing vCenter Server, this feature can also be enabled after the fact. To do so, you will need to login to your vCenter Server using the vSphere Web Client and under the Settings tab of your vCenter Server, there is an option to enable or disable the Customer Experience Improvement Program

Note: When enabling or disabling the Customer Experience Improvement Program, a restart of vCenter Server is not necessary.

Hopefully customers will see the benefit and value in joining the VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program and over time, I think you will start to see some really neat benefits for those who participate in this program.

How to build custom ESXi ISO for Apple Mac Mini?

09.11.2014 by William Lam // 43 Comments

For those of you who own an Apple Mac Mini 6,2 may recall some of the, lets call them "challenges" on getting ESXi to run on the Mini. These challenges range from known SMC issues from Apple to missing or updated Broadcom tg3 network drivers. Though there workarounds for these issue, the process was quite complex. I took it upon myself to help simplify it by building custom ESXi ISO's for most of the major ESXi releases so that users could simply install ESXi as they normally would and by-pass all the complexity.

This has worked for the majority of folks but I have received several requests for those that may not be comfortable with just downloading a random ISO on the internet, which I can fully understand. The other reason is that some folks would like to build their own custom ISO and include other drivers/packages and others are just interested in the process. This has been on my to-do list for awhile but it was finding the time to document the process but also I normally like to take it a step further and see how I can make it even more simple 🙂

Disclaimer: Running ESXi on an Apple Mac Mini is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk

With the recent release of vSphere 5.5 Update 2, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to show how you can build your own custom ESXi ISO to run on the Apple Mac Mini 6,2.

Note: Earlier versions of Mac Mini should work fine for the most part without additional modifications.

Before I get started, I would also like to mention that several of the "challenges" such as having an updated Broadcom tg3 drivers have been fixed in the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 release, so out of the box you will be able to see the on-board network device working as expected and Ethernet Thunderbolt will also be functional if you are using that device with no additional drivers being required. I have been able to successfully install the default out of the box ESXi 5.5 Update 2 ISO from VMware on my Apple Mac Mini 5,3 without any additional changes.

Here is the process for building your own custom ESXi ISO for your Mac Mini:

Step 1 - Download the ESXi ISO you wish to work with

Step 2 - You will need access to a Linux system (recommend CentOS) that has mkisofs utlity, which is used to author an ISO

Step 3 - Download my custom.tgz which will automatically handle the SMC issue for Apple Mac Mini 6,2

Step 4 - Download my ghettotize-esxi-iso.sh which is a shell script that will automatically take an ESXi ISO and author a new ISO containing the fixes. The script is pretty straight forward and you can take a look at the script for all the details.

Here is an example of running the script against the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 ISO:

As you can see at the end of the script, you should get a new authored ISO with a -NEW in the filename:

Once you have the new ISO, you can then take that and load that onto a USB device. I like using unetbootin which is a handy utility that is supported on all platforms and creates a bootable USB device with the ISO provided. As you can see the process is pretty straight forward and though it took a bit of "experimentation" on my end to make it completely seamless, you can see there is too much to the process in general.