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vSAN ESA HCL hardware mock VIB for Nested ESXi

01.23.2025 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Whether you are configuring vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) directly from vCenter Server or from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the underlying ESXi hardware is automatically validated against the vSAN ESA Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) to ensure that you are using supported vSAN hardware.

In the case of vCenter Server, you can simply ignore the HCL warnings and accept the risks and proceed with the configuration but when using VCF, the operation is blocked to ensure customers have a good experience when selecting vSAN ESA when deploying a VCF Management or Workload  Domain.


With that said, there is workaround where you can create your own custom vSAN ESA HCL JSON based on the hardware that you have and then upload that to either Cloud Builder for setting up a new VCF Management Domain or to SDDC Manager for deploying a new VCF Workload Domain, which I have blogged about HERE and HERE.

The use of Nested ESXi is a very popular way to deploy VCF, especially if you are new to solution and allows you to easily experiment and learn. More recently, I have noticed an uptick in the interests for deploying VCF with vSAN ESA and while you can certainly generate a custom vSAN ESA HCL as mentioned earlier, the process still requires some effort and in some situations the vSAN ESA HCL could get overwritten leading some frustration in debugging.

After helping some folks debug their VCF environments recently, I was thinking about a better experience and leveraging another technique that may not be very well known externally ...

UPDATE (02/03/25) - This solution can also be used for a physical ESXi deployment for use with vSAN ESA and VCF.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Nested Virtualization, VMware Cloud Foundation, VSAN Tags // Nested ESXi, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN ESA

Easier method to simulate custom ESXi SMBIOS hardware strings

01.06.2025 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Happy 2025! 🎉 Here is a fun one to kick off the New Year ☺️

Last year, I demonstrated a method for customizing the SMBIOS hardware string using Nested ESXi, but the solution was not perfect and required hacking up a VM ROM file and it was also limited to using the BIOS firmware for your Nested ESXi VM as the behavior for EFI firmware was different.

I was doing some research towards the end of last year and I came across a much more elegant solution that works for both physical and virtual ESXi!

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, Nested Virtualization Tags // Nested ESXi, SMBIOS

How to distinguish between classic vSphere VMs vs vSphere IaaS Pod VMs? 

12.19.2024 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Not all vSphere-based VMs are the same! This is especially true with the introduction of vSphere IaaS (formally known as vSphere Supervisor or vSphere with Tanzu or Project Pacific) which includes a modern way of provisioning a traditional/classic VM but also a new VM-based form factor known as vSphere Pod VMs.


There was a recent question internally about how you could you distinguish between traditional/classic VMs built from vSphere UI or API versus the vSphere Pod VMs using PowerCLI and specifically using the default Get-VM cmdlet?

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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Recent

  • Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) 05/06/2025
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  • Supported chipsets for the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling 04/23/2025
  • vCenter Identity Federation with Authelia 04/16/2025
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