WilliamLam.com

Quick Tip - How to actually disable host encryption mode on ESXi?

by // 9 Comments

This recent quote from my buddy Timo Sugliani (definitely worth a follow on Twitter), perfectly captures the essence of an issue that I had ran into and I am sure many of you can also relate! 😀

Trying to do ONE thing and deviating to X, Y and Z. The common IT Journey

I was trying to generate an ESXi support bundle to share with Engineering and when ran the "vm-support" command, I was surprised that it failed with the following message:

Command cannot succeed because this host is in crypto safe mode and the vm-support incident key is missing.


I had never seen this message before and I had assumed it was probably due to my recent use of adding vTPM to VM that caused the host encryption mode to get enabled on this particular ESXi host. Although there were commands that I could run follow, I actually just wanted to disable it and get the support bundle over to Engineering. I figure I should be able to easily disable it, right?

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - ESXi 7.0 Update 3f now includes all Intel I219 devices from Community Networking Driver Fling

by // Leave a Comment

Thanks to Reuben F who left a comment on the Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling asking about something interesting he saw in the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 3f release notes regarding Intel ne1000 driver.

ESXi 7.0 Update 3f upgrades the Intel-ne1000 driver to support Intel I219-LM devices that are required for newer server models, such as the Intel Rocket Lake-S platform. The TCP segmentation offload for the I219 devices is deactivated because of known issues in the hardware DMA.

He asked whether the Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling was still needed to support the various Intel I219 devices on the Fling requirements page?

First off, thank you Reuben for making me aware of this, which I totally missed while reading the release notes. Secondly, I reached out to Songtao, one of the Engineers on Fling and he was also surprised by the news. He checked the source and then confirmed that all listed Intel I219 devices in the Fling has actually been incorporated into the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 3f release and the Fling would no longer be required for these specific devices and we have Shu, another Engineer on the Fling to thank for this awesome update! Thank you Shu!

Songtao, Shu and myself had released the Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling back in early 2021 to help support some of the networking devices that we had observed in the community and there have been a number of releases that has added additional devices. It is always a great feeling to see your work not only being well adopted but also now productized. This is one of the many benefits of the VMware Fling's program and being able to share a solution that solves an immediate problem and iterating on feedback from our users, we have the opportunity to enhance and improve our products/services. Thank you to all the VMware customers who have and continue to support us! ?

Who knows ... maybe the network devices under the igc-community module in the Fling will be productized next? 😀

Emulating a Virtual USB storage device using Nested ESXi

by // 4 Comments

My buddy Alan Renouf had pinged me earlier today and asked whether it was possible to emulate a USB storage device that could aide him in the testing the installation of ESXi from a USB device but without having to use a real USB device. I honestly was not aware of any mechanisms that would allow for this and I normally would just passthrough a real USB device to a Nested ESXi VM for this type of testing purposes.

While thinking about his question, I also recall we had made some enhancements to our Virtual USB interface that would allow user to back it using a disk file. While searching further, I came to learn that not only was this possible, but it was also a common method for testing USB-based installation without the hassle of messing with physical hardware. It turns out you can just present a Virtual Disk (VMDK) to a VM running ESXi (Nested ESXi) and through a special driver, it will recognize the device as a USB storage device!

I definitely wish I had learned about this earlier and it goes to show, all the hard engineering efforts made by our VMware Engineers to make testing and using our software as easy as possible even without needing real physical hardware 😀

[Read more...]