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Quick Tip - Using ESXi Scripted Installation (kickstart) to configure IPv6 networking

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I have written numerous articles on the topic of ESXi Scripted Installation aka Kickstart, which is just one of the many options that enables customers to fully automate the installation and configuration of their ESXi hosts. An interesting question that recently came up internally was whether you could configure ESXi networking using IPv6, rather than IPv4 using the default ESXi Kickstart network parameters?

If you look at the ESXi network params as they are labeled such as netmask, it would seem that these are only applicable to IPv4. Although my personal experience has been exclusively IPv4, I figure I would take a quick look at the python code which powers the ESXi Kickstart infrastructure which is located under /usr/lib/vmware/weasel directory. Although I am not a Developer, from what I could grok, it seems like IPv6 might actually be possible using these exact same parameters.

Using Nested ESXi and the new vSphere 7.0 Update 2 feature HTTP Boot over virtual EFI, I was able to setup a quick prototype to validate that you can indeed configure IPv6 using the same ESXi networking parameters, which are applicable to both IPv4 and IPv6.

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ESXi running in unexpected places ...

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I am still blown away by the diversity of hardware platforms and environments that our customers continue to run their mission critical workloads using ESXi, VMware's Enterprise Type-1 Hypervisor. VMware ESXi is literally deployed in every market segment and vertical that you can imagine and even ones that you may not think of across land ⛰️, air ?, sea ?️ and even space ?.

I still vividly remember back in 2012, when ESXi was able to run on an Apple Mac Mini and how that enabled a new class of use cases for accelerated development and testing of iOS and MacOS applications that was just never possible before. In fact, this also enabled our partners like MacStadium, one of the largest Virtualized MacOS infrastructure provider running on VMware to deliever this offering as-a-service. Most recently, I also learned the popular Github Actions, specifically when using MacOS virtual environments, that it was also leveraging VMware under the hood which is very cool if you ask me!?

Another memorable moment was in 2018, a huge ?? at our VMworld conference when Ray O'Farrell (former VMware CTO) picked up a tiny device, which we learned was a Raspberry Pi running ESXi and VMware finally introduced to the world our ESXi-Arm initiative.

The ESXi Hypervisor has certainly come a long way from the early days of the VMware Hardware Compatibility (HCL) and VMware continues to expand into new markets and form factors like Data Processing Units (DPUs) as part of the recently announced Project Monterey. Edge computing is another area that is growing extremely rapidly and this recent article featuring our CEO Raghu states that "Edge computing is growing faster than Cloud" which will certainly drive further innovations with our ESXi platform to meet the needs of our customers.

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Quick Tip - Adding a vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) to a Nested ESXi VM

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I had an interesting question this morning asking whether it was possible to add a vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) to a Nested ESXi VM? The user was interested in testing a particular scenario with the new vSphere Trust Authority feature that was introduced in the vSphere 7.0. I personally had not done much with vTPM and I had assumed it should just work as long as you have a physical TPM chip in the underlying hardware and you have setup either a Standard or Native Key Provider within your vCenter Server.

The user observed that adding a vTPM to a Windows VM was possible using the vSphere UI but when attempting to perform the same operation on a Nested ESXi VM, the option to add vTPM device was not available. After spending ~30 minutes asking around for hardware that had a physical TPM, I remember that my Quartz Canyon NUC (NUC 9 Pro) is a Xeon based system and it has TPM 2.0 chip. I was able to take a closer look and quickly found the solution was very pretty straight forward!

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