WilliamLam.com

How to replace some of ESXi Kickstart automation with new configstorecli commands?

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I had received a question a couple of weeks back from a customer who was already automating their ESXi installation using ESXi Kickstart, also known as ESXi Scripted Installation but they had ran into an issue when migrating the exact same automation to the latest ESXi 7.0 releases.

The method the customer was using to manage their ESXi password policies, which was by updating the /etc/pam.d/passwd file, no longer function as expected and this was a result of the introduction of the ESXi ConfigStore, which I have written about here.

As mentioned in the article, the goal of the ESXi ConfigStore is the following:

The goal of the ConfigStore, initially introduced in ESXi 7.0 Update 1, is to centrally manage all configurations for an ESXi host instead of relying on different methods including a variety of configuration files.

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ESXi on AMD ChangWang CW56-58

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It can be pretty difficult to find an AMD-based small form factor (SFF) kit that is compatible with recent ESXi releases. The large majority of these AMD SFF kits all use Realtek for their onboard network adaptor and Realtek does not have a driver for ESXi, nor have they expressed any interests in creating one.

This is also quite unfortunate, as there have been some pretty interesting AMD kits that have been released in the market, but they can not be fully utilized due to the network driver challenges. Prior to the holiday break, fellow VMware colleague Hilko Lantinga, who works in our End User Computing (EUC) division had reached out about a new AMD kit that he had just acquired and has been very happy with after putting it through its paces, especially from a power efficiency standpoint for his updated VMware Homelab.

The system is from a vendor called ChangWang, which I was not familiar with and the AMD kit is the CW56-58, which is based on an AMD Zen 3 architecture (7nm) and what stands out immediately is that this system includes four built-in network adaptors (hint: they are all compatible with latest ESXi 8.0 release)! I asked if he would be willing to sharing his thorough review with the community as this could be a really interesting system and below is Hilko's detailed write-up in his own words.


The following content below is a contribution from Hilko Lantinga.

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ESXi Advanced & Kernel Settings Reference

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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.

UPDATE (08/13/24) - vCenter Server Advanced Settings Reference is now available.

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