WilliamLam.com

ESXi Advanced & Kernel Settings Reference

by // 3 Comments

Every time I need to recall or reference a specific ESXi Advanced or Kernel Setting for a customer or field inquiry, I typically need to look at a live ESXi host to see whether a given setting is defined for that version of ESXi and also how to access and/or update the settings. Depending on the interface (vSphere API, vSphere UI, ESXCLI, etc.) that you are using, you may only be able to see a subset of these properties.

For example, some ESXi Advanced Settings are only available using the vSphere API/UI while others are available in both the vSphere API/UI and ESXCLI, with the latter being a common utility for customers to view or update these settings. Similarly, for ESXi Kernel Settings, not only are there new options that are introduced with each ESXi release, but being able to easily check the default values and minimums and maximums can also be useful. I should also mention using the vSphere API/UI, you can also accessed the ESXi Kernel Settings which are prefixed with VMkernel.

As a huge VMware Automation person, I was surprised that I had not thought about creating a reference for the ESXi Advanced and Kernel Settings for recent ESXi releases? I figure this would benefit more than just myself and I have put together the following Github repo: https://github.com/lamw/esxi-advanced-and-kernel-settings where you can see all the default ESXi Advanced and Kernel Settings for ESXi releases across 6.0, 6.5, 7.0 and 8.0.


For those interested, this was generated using some PowerCLI automation and below are the two snippets for pulling the ESXi Advanced Settings (supported and runtime values) using the vSphere API and the ESXi Kernel Settings, which I used the ESXCLI interface that is exposed through the PowerCLI Get-EsxCli cmdlet.

[Read more...]

Important - NVMe SSD not found after upgrading to ESXi 7.0

by // 17 Comments

Several folks in the community had reported issues that after upgrading from ESXi 6.7 to 7.0, their Samsung NVMe PCIe SSDs were no longer showing up. The first report of this was from Ivo Beerens and eventually found that reinstalling ESXi from scratch works but certainly that was not ideal. Just yesterday, I saw that Jeffrey Kusters also shared a similiar issue and used a different workaround which allowed him to upgrade. I also reached out to VMware Engineering as they thought this was a strange behavior but needed to see the logs to understand what was actually going on. Since Jeffrey's setup was an upgrade, I was able to get a copy of his vm-support bundle to provide to Engineering.

Within minutes of looking at the support bundle, they quickly identified the issue and this was caused by using the incorrect ESXCLI command to upgrade a standalone ESXi host from 6.7 to 7.0. Instead of using "esxcli software vib update" command, folks should be using "esxcli software profile update" which has always been the correct command to use when upgrading an ESXi image. In fact, this has been in the vSphere documentation for quite some time and here is the ESXi 7.0 version of that documentation. More importantly, the incorrect command only upgrades the ESXi 6.7 VIBs that exists and does not install any of the ESXi 7.0 VIBs, which means after the upgrade, you are not only missing the nvme-pcie VIB but many other ESXi 7.0 VIBs!

tl;dr - If you are going to use ESXCLI to upgrade your standalone ESXi host, please make sure to use the correct command or you will have issues. Below are the two commands you will need to determine which ESXi Image Profiles are available given an offline bundle and then updating to a specific image profile.

List Image Profiles from ESXi 7.0 Offline Bundle:

[[email protected]:~] esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/e200-8d-local-datastore/VMware-ESXi-7.0.0-15843807-depot.zip
Name Vendor Acceptance Level Creation Time Modification Time
---------------------------- ------------ ---------------- ------------------- -------------------
ESXi-7.0.0-15843807-standard VMware, Inc. PartnerSupported 2020-03-16T10:48:54 2020-03-16T10:48:54
ESXi-7.0.0-15843807-no-tools VMware, Inc. PartnerSupported 2020-03-16T10:48:54 2020-03-16T10:48:54

Upgrade to a specific Image Profile from ESXi 7.0 Offline Bundle:

esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/e200-8d-local-datastore/VMware-ESXi-7.0.0-15843807-depot.zip -p ESXi-7.0.0-15843807-standard

Automated NSX-T 2.0 Lab Deployment

by // 21 Comments

Last week, I had spent some time exploring and getting myself more familiar with NSX-T, which is the next generation release of the NSX platform from VMware. One of the first thing I do when learning about a new product is to setup a lab environment that I can using. Having gone through the deployment once by hand, I realized it would be quite painful if I needed to do this again, which I know I will and I did 🙂 I wanted to have a simliar experience to my vGhetto Automated vSphere Lab deployment script which also including setting up the entire vSphere infrastructure along with deploying and configuring NSX-V and extending it to support NSX-T.

Since my original script leverages PowerCLI to access both the vSphere and NSX APIs, I wanted to do the same with NSX-T. Funny enough, the PowerCLI team had just published an update release (6.5.3) which also added support for NSX-T and I thought this was perfect timing to try out the NSX-T APIs, which I had never used before.

UPDATE (01/01/2018) - I have verified the script also works with the latest NSX-T 2.1 which was just released before Christmas. The script has also been updated to create a new Edge Uplink Profile along with an Edge Cluster and automatically associate all Edge VMs to Edge Cluster.

I have created a new Github repository called vghetto-nsxt-automated-lab-deployment which contains detailed instructions along with the PowerCLI script.

Here is what the script is currently performing:

  1. Deploy and configure vCenter Server Appliance 6.5u1
  2. Deploy and configure 3 x Nested ESXi 6.5u1 Virtual Appliance VMs and attaching it to vCenter Server
  3. Deploy NSX-T Manager, 3 x Controllers & 1 x Edge and setup both the Management and Control Cluster Plane
  4. Configure NSX-T with IP Pool, Transport Zone, Add vCenter Server as Compute Manager, Create Logical Switch, Prepare ESXi hosts, Create Uplink Profile & Add configure ESXi hosts as a Transport Node

Similiar to the vSphere version of this script, all deployed VMs will be placed inside of a vCenter vApp construct as shown in the example screenshot below:


Here is an example output of a succesful deployment and you go from nothing to a fully functional NSX-T environment in just 50 minutes, which is pretty awesome if you ask me!?

[Read more...]