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Easily audit ESXi boot options programmatically in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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ESXi (kernel) boot options can be added during ESXi boot up (by pressing SHIFT+O) or by updating the ESXi boot.cfg configuration to influence specific configurations and/or behaviors.

In the past, it was difficult to get visibility across your fleet of ESXi hosts on which hosts might be using custom boot options, especially in cases where you might not need them anymore or worse if someone has manually added a configuration that you did not intend.

In vSphere 8.0 Update 3, a new bootCommandLine property has been added to the vSphere API and can now provide full visibility into all boot options used for a given ESXi host.

PowerCLI 13.3 had also GA'ed yesterday, which supports latest APIs introduced in both vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2  and you can easily access this new property by running the following command:

(Get-VMHost).ExtensionData.Hardware.SystemInfo

Slick Jonsbo D31 computer case with embedded LCD screen for homelab

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Last month, I noticed a very interesting DIY (Do it Yourself) computer build from fellow colleague Cyprien Laplace, who you might know from the ESXi-Arm team.


No surprise, the build was for a new ESXi-Arm homelab using an ASRock Ampere Altra (ALTRAD8UD-1L2T) and configured with 64 CPUs and 128GB of memory! ?

At first, when Cyprien was sharing his build updates on Twitter/X, it looked like a standard DIY project but then several folks noticed he had a pretty unique computer case that included a built-in LCD screen! The classic grey/yellow screen pictured above running ESXi-Arm looks amazing and certainly useful for those wanting to remove the dependency of an external monitor.

If you are in the market for building or upgrading your homelab and want a unique computer case, check out th Jonsbo D31 which comes in both Black or White with two different models:

Black

White

Cyprien's ESXi-Arm build also recently won the best homelab community build (#3) project that was sponsored by Newegg and Ampere, so congrats on the W! ??️?‍⬛

Quick Tip - Updating Intel ixgben driver enables Multi-gigabit (2.5gbE / 5GbE) selection in ESXi

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Here is a nice protip from one of my readers, Peter, who recently came across an issue with an Intel x550 network adaptor and ESXi not listing any of the Multi-gigabit (2.5GbE or 5GbE) options even though his underlying physical network was setup as 2.5GbE, only 100MBps, 1GbE and 10GbE was available.

After a bit of trial/error, he discovered the solution was to update the inbox version of the Intel ixgben driver (1.7.1.44-1vmw.803.0.0.24022510) to the latest supported version for ESXi 8.x and he immediately saw the additional Multi-gigabit speeds as shown in his screenshot below:

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