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ESXi with Intel Arc 750 / 770 GPU

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I recently had the opportunity to play with one of Intel's Arc 7 series discrete GPU (A750), which is part of the new Intel Arc desktop graphics product line, that was just released last Fall. While the primary audience for the Intel Arc graphics is for creators and desktop gaming, I was really interested in its applicability for a vSphere-based environment which also has a number of interesting use cases for graphics from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), video transcoding/rendering, AI/ML, Kubernetes, general purpose graphics acceleration and even basic gaming to name a few.

While there are many GPU options in the market for vSphere, depending on your needs and budget, the new Intel's new Arc 7 series could be a nice modern option as it is touted to be both price and performance competitive with other offerings within the market.

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How to bootstrap vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) on unsupported hardware?

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I was recently chatting with a fellow colleague who asked an interesting question about the memory overhead between running vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) versus the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) from a VMware Homelab perspective. I honestly did not know the answer as I am only using vSAN OSA for my personal homelab. I was curious myself, especially its implicationn on small form factor (SFF) systems which typically max at out 64GB of memory.

Today, vSAN ESA is only officially supported when using vSAN ESA Ready Nodes which are all listed in the vSAN ESA HCL and the minimum amount of memory is 512GB. For the best possible experience and supported configurations, customers should only use approved vSAN ESA hardware and the use of any other systems will not yield the same benefits nor outcomes. As an aside, a fantastic resource for all things vSAN ESA can be found on the vSAN ESA TechZone page, which I highly recommend bookmarking as there is a lot of in-depth technical resources and collateral.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and is purely for educational purposes, use at your own risk.

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Quick Tip - Automating ESXi local user passwords using SHA512 encrypted hashes

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For those that automate their ESXi installations using Kickstart aka ESXi scripted installation should be quite familiar with the ability to configure the root password as part of the installation. As described in the official ESXi documentation, the --rootpw option can either contain a plain text password (not recommended) or with the use of the additional --iscrypted option, a SHA512 hash of the password can also be used, which is definitely recommended and more secure.

However, when managing additional local users via ESXCLI system account, which I recently blogged about here, I noticed that you can only provide a plain text password either on the command-line (not recommended) or interactively, which prevents this process from being automated. As mentioned in the blog post, you could store the password and the commands into another script file and this will at least hide the password from being stored in the ESXi Shell log file (/var/log/shell.log) but this is far from ideal.

While sharing this feedback with Engineering as part of a feature enhancement request, I came to learn about a nice little utility that can be used with both ESXi 7.x and 8.x that can update local user by simply providing the encrypted SHA512 hash.

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