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Quick Tip - Using ESXi Scripted Installation (kickstart) to configure IPv6 networking

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I have written numerous articles on the topic of ESXi Scripted Installation aka Kickstart, which is just one of the many options that enables customers to fully automate the installation and configuration of their ESXi hosts. An interesting question that recently came up internally was whether you could configure ESXi networking using IPv6, rather than IPv4 using the default ESXi Kickstart network parameters?

If you look at the ESXi network params as they are labeled such as netmask, it would seem that these are only applicable to IPv4. Although my personal experience has been exclusively IPv4, I figure I would take a quick look at the python code which powers the ESXi Kickstart infrastructure which is located under /usr/lib/vmware/weasel directory. Although I am not a Developer, from what I could grok, it seems like IPv6 might actually be possible using these exact same parameters.

Using Nested ESXi and the new vSphere 7.0 Update 2 feature HTTP Boot over virtual EFI, I was able to setup a quick prototype to validate that you can indeed configure IPv6 using the same ESXi networking parameters, which are applicable to both IPv4 and IPv6.

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vSphere Event-Driven Automation using VMware Event Router on VMware Cloud on AWS with Knative or AWS EventBridge

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The VMware Event Broker Application (VEBA) is a popular VMware Event-Driven Automation solution that can be consumed using either the open source or commercial offering from VMware. The commercial offering of VEBA is already available to customers today via our Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) offering, which I have previously written about here. The open source offering of VEBA can be consumed in either a pre-packaged Virtual Appliance or a native Kubernetes Application called for those with an existing Kubernetes cluster.

Deploying the VEBA Virtual Appliance is well documented (here and here) and I wanted to spend some time covering the native Kubernetes deployment model, as it there are actually a couple of options and most recently, this came up in a customer discussions as they were interested in forwarding vSphere Events from VEBA to AWS EventBridge.

In the open source version of VEBA, there is a component called the VMware Event Router, which is responsible for connecting to an event source such as vCenter Server and then forwarding those events to a processor which can either be a a function that you have written to react to a specific event using Knative or to AWS EventBridge to integrate with other AWS native services like CloudWatch as an example.

To demonstrate the two different ways to deploy the VMware Event Router, I have created the following Github repo https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-event-driven-automation-vmware-event-router that provides an example to easily deploy the VMware Event Router to an existing Kubernetes cluster. For my environment, I will be using VMware Cloud on AWS and the managed Kubernetes offering called Tanzu services, which is included as part of the base offering and there is no additional cost of running the Kubernetes infrastructure, which is certainly an added bonus 😀

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How to retrieve the default VM hardware configuration for a specific Guest OS in vSphere?

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Have you ever wondered how or where the vSphere UI generates the default Virtual Machine hardware configuration after selecting a specific Guest OS during the VM creation wizard?


The answer is simply by asking the vSphere platform 🙂 and of course this is provided as an API for any client to consume including our own vSphere UI.

This is a topic I had written about back in 2013 here and here, which demonstrates how to use the EnvironmentBrowser API to query for the list of supported Guest OS and Virtual Hardware Compatibility. In addition to this information, we can also ask the vSphere platform on what are the default hardware configuration for all supported Guest OS using the QueryConfigOption API.

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