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Scaling ESX DCUI & Console for Compressed Screen Resolution

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I recently shared my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Mini Rack build, which includes the use of a tiny 7" LCD screen for direct console access to the ESX hosts. Since the LCD is optimizing for the 10" inch rack, it is also using a non-standard resolution of 1280x400, which can make the output pretty compressed as you can see from the ESX DCUI screen.


This is definitely a niche use case, but I was curious if we had any workarounds that could be used to improve the screen resolution, especially handling large amounts of text when going into the ESX Shell 🤔

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Updated method for automatically joining vCenter Server using ESXi Kickstart

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Have you ever written a script that gets the job done and years later, you go back and ask yourself ... what the heck did I do or why did I do it that way!?! 😅

Probably not as frequent as we should but I have found myself in these situations over the years, whether it is addressing an issue/enhancement or needing to explain the code to another colleague.

While copious free time is never on our side in IT, it does help to re-evaluate your automation and processes over the years to see if there are new techniques, enhancements that can make the automation more effective.

I was recently CC'ed on a Reddit thread about some automation that I had worked on more than 14 years ago that would automatically join an ESXi host to vCenter Server using an ESXi Kickstart script.

Knowing what I know now and probably even earlier, the solution of calling into the vSphere MOB and manually crafting the XML payload to join the ESXi host to a desired vSphere Cluster in vCenter Server was certainly not ideal, but it got the job done. We can certainly improve the solution leveraging a more modern solution, while still staying true to the original requirements of being able to perform vSphere Cluster addition directly from ESXi 8.x/9.x Kickstart without relying on external dependencies.

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Custom UEFI Boot Menu for ESXi 9.0 using rEFInd

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Unless I am working with an unreleased version of ESXi, I usually install it by booting from a USB drive that includes an embedded Kickstart configuration file, that will fully automate the installation.

For a single ESXi host deployment, this workflow works great but if you have more than one host with different ESXi Kickstart configuration files, you will either need multiple USB drives or you have to keep updating the embedded Kickstart file reference using a single USB device.

There are a number of different ways to solve this problem, I have covered many of the solutions in my Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation at Scale session at VMware Explore.

With that said, since I have been deploying several Minisforum MS-A2 for use with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, I wanted to explore a solution that had been requested in the past but I never had the time to look into, which is creating a custom ESXi boot menu that would allow you to select specific ESXi version and/or kickstart configuration files.

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