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Changing the default HTTP(s) Reverse Proxy Ports on ESXi 8.0

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The process of changing the default ports for the ESXi Reverse Proxy service has always been pretty straight forward, which I had also shared back in 2015 HERE. While most customers stick with the default configuration (80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS), we do have some customers that need to change these ports to meet certain organization security and/or compliance requirements.

I recently came across a customer report where the previous method for changing the ESXi Reverse Proxy ports on an 8.0 host no longer worked and the only thing that was shared was that the user could no longer run ESXCLI directly within the ESXi Shell, which I thought was a strange observation.

I deployed the latest ESXi 8.0b as a Nested ESXi VM and I went through the instructions I had outlined in my blog post HERE and changed the HTTPS port from 443 to 4444, which was the setup the user was looking to do and I ran into the exact same issue. At first, I thought maybe we actually no longer support this capability and decided to quickly test by using the remote version of ESXCLI, which allows you to specify a port as part of the connection and it failed with the same error.

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NFS Multi-Connections in vSphere 8.0 Update 1

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The upcoming vSphere 8.0 Update 1 release includes a lot of exciting new features, some of which you can learn about by listening to either The Unexplored Territory and VirtuallySpeaking Podcasts, both of which covered the vSphere 8.0 Update 1 launch announcement. One of the highlighted core storage platform feature is the long awaited NFS capability that will allows users to select and isolate a specific VMKernel interface as shown in the screenshot below.


This actually reminded me of another interesting NFS capability that will also be part of the upcoming vSphere 8.0 Update 1 release, which is for ESXi to support multiple TCP connections for a single NFS v3 volume, also referred to as nconnect for those familiar with this NFS capability.

For those interested in this new NFS capability, it is important to note that this setting will initially only be configurable by using either the vSphere API or ESXCLI directly on an ESXi host.

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Quick Tip - How to download ESXi ISO image for all releases including patch updates?

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Not all ESXi releases, including patch updates are available as an ISO image that can be downloaded. Depending on the type of ESXi release, it will either be available as an ISO and Offline Bundle (zip) format which can downloaded from the ESXi Customer Connect portal or only as an Offline Bundle which must be downloaded from the VMware Patch portal.

I typically see folks forgetting about the VMware Patch portal, which also provides patch updates for the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), when they are searching for a new ESXi updates. Let's take a look at an example using the ESXi 7.0 Update 3 release, as you can see from the screenshot below, you can download 7.0 Update 3c, d, f and g from the Customer Connector portal but for 7.0 Update 3e, i, j and k you will need to use the VMware Patch portal.


As mentioned earlier, when downloading ESXi patches from the VMware Patch portal, they are only available in the Offline Bundle format, which might work for most typical patch use cases but in some scenarios, you may actually want it in an ISO format, especially for initial installation.

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