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VMware Cloud Foundation with a single ESXi host for Management Domain?

02.21.2023 by William Lam // 2 Comments

By default, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) requires a minimum of 4 ESXi hosts to construct the Management Domain which is fine for a production environment, but it can be a challenge for those interested in explore VCF in a homelab setting.

I recently came to learn about a really cool tidbit from one of our VCF Engineers on how you can actually deploy a VCF Management Domain using just a single ESXi host, ideal for a homelab setup! ๐Ÿ˜


Not only could this benefit users in deploying a physical VCF setup but it would also benefit anyone using my Automated Lab Deployment Script for VCF, which makes it super easy by leveraging my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance VMs.


In fact, that was how I quickly verified this trick works using my VCF automation script ๐Ÿ˜€

The way that this work is a configuration change to Cloud Builder to tell it to allow a single ESXi host to be used and it will simply setup a single node vSAN Cluster, which is typically how you would bootstrap if you were doing a greenfield deployment. The only difference here is that instead of adding additional 3 x ESXi hosts to provide redundancy for Management Domain, it simply is relaxing that requirement and thus allowing for a single ESXi host. vSAN is still a requirement for VCF Management Domain, so ensure you can meet those requirements still.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, Home Lab, NSX, VMware Cloud Foundation, VSAN, vSphere Tags // VMware Cloud Foundation

Quick Tip - Convert VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Deployment Workbook XLSX to JSON

02.17.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

The deployment wizard for VMware Cloud Builder (CB) can accept either an XLSX or JSON configuration file that describes your desired VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment.


Interestingly enough, only an XLSX template is available for users to download, edit and then provide that back as user input. While I can appreciate the rich logic that has been built into the CB workbook, I personally would prefer to work with something a bit more straight forward like JSON, especially for theย ability to easily source control via Git/etc.

I have been spending some time with VCF 4.5 and CB this week and I have always wondered if there was a way to convert to JSON format given an XLSX as the initial input. While poking around the logs, I noticed a reference to the following script /opt/vmware/bringup/scripts/json-generator.sh which is used by CB to convert an XLSX to JSON document.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, VMware Cloud Foundation Tags // VMware Cloud Foundation

Create Windows 11 Virtual Appliance using Tiny 11 with only 2GB memory

02.15.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I recently came to learn about a really cool project called Tiny 11 which is a stripped down version of Windows 11 Pro 22H2 that can run with just 2GB of memory and 8GB of storage. While you would probably not use this for production workloads, it could be interesting for those with homelabs and can even for demo purposes.

It's finally here!
Based off of Windows 11 Pro 22H2, tiny11 has everything you need for a comfortable computing experience without the bloat and clutter of a standard Windows installation.
https://t.co/yM1Ip2ljjB pic.twitter.com/Tg5PWUZU1Q

— NTDEV @*protected email* (@NTDEV_) February 2, 2023

Disclaimer: Tiny 11 is not an official project from Microsoft, use at your own risk. If you are interested in creating an optimized Windows 10 or 11 image, you can also check out these VMware resources here and here to produce a similiar size image using official Microsoft tools and images.

UPDATE (02/16/23) - There is now an Arm version for Tiny 11, which is great for anyone using the ESXi-Arm Fling and the technique in this blog post would also apply.

๐Ÿ™Œ Updated Tiny 11 Arm64 (tiny11a64 r1.iso) now works perfectly with @esxi_arm ๐Ÿ’ช

Thanks @NTDEV_ for the Arm version & quick fix!#ESXionARM pic.twitter.com/03TV69wMIq

— William Lam (@*protected email*) (@lamw) February 16, 2023

After performing a manual installation of Tiny 11, I thought it would be neat if I could build a Virtual Appliance (OVA) for Tiny 11 and also add custom OVF properties, which would allow anyone to customize the OS further without having to rely on any external tooling.

In fact, I had demonstrated this concept back in 2019 using Windows Server 2016 in this blog post and I figure it should be easy enough to also do the same for Tiny 11 or even standard Windows 11! With a bit of trial/error, I was indeed able to create a simple Tiny 11 OVA that includes the following OVF properties as shown in the screenshot below.


My initial goal was to fully automate the building of a Tiny 11 OVA with custom OVF properties using Packer. However, after many attempts, I was not able to figure out the correct autoattended.xml configuration and decided on a semi-manual approach which is detailed in the instructions below. If anyone is able to figure out how to get Tiny 11 installed via Packer, then I may revisit this topic and automate the remainder of the setup.

Note: The instructions below are not specific to Tiny 11 in any way and is also applicable to standard Windows 10 or 11 image.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Home Lab, OVFTool, PowerCLI, vSphere Tags // homelab, Tiny 11, virtual appliance, windows 11

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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Recent

  • How to enable passthrough for USB Network Adapters claimed by ESXi CDCE Driver? 03/30/2023
  • Self-Contained & Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment using new VLC Holodeck Toolkit 03/29/2023
  • ESXi configstorecli enhancement in vSphere 8.0 Update 1 03/28/2023
  • ESXi on Intel NUC 13 Pro (Arena Canyon) 03/27/2023
  • Quick Tip - Enabling ESXi Coredumps to be stored on USB 03/26/2023

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