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Automated ESXi Installation to USB using Kickstart

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I frequently re-install ESXi on my physical host for various types of testing as I normally work with a number of future releases. Although the process just takes a couple of minutes, having to enter the exact same information each time and also requiring a keyboard and monitor is not really ideal. For the majority, this is really not a problem and manually going through the install workflow is fine for most folks, especially as this is an infrequent operation.

However, with some recent customer conversations, I thought it was worth while to re-visit this topic and demonstrating just how easy it is to automate the installation of ESXi with just a single bootable USB device and embedding an ESXi Kickstart Script. Even for infrequent installation and/or upgrades of ESXi for home labs, this can be a time saver, especially if you do not have monitor and keyboard just lying around. Below are instructions including a reference Kickstart example that folks can use as a starting point. For more advanced automation, please take a look at my ESXi Kickstart Resources as well as the official VMware documentation for ESXi Scripted Installations.

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New hardware support & enhancements to USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

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Since releasing the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling back in February, the feedback and support for this Fling has simply been amazing. I especially enjoy hearing from customers, almost on a weekly basis, on how they are taking advantage of this solution in their vSphere/vSAN/NSX home lab and enabling for more complex networking topologies.

When we released the fling, we had focused on the most popular USB 3.0 network adaptors that we had accessed to which were based on AX8817a, AX88179 & RTL8153 chipsets. The initial list started out with just 5 devices, but we knew there were going to be others. In fact, Songtao and I have received plenty of feedback from our customers on what they would like to see supported, including USB 2.0 network adaptors. Another highly requested feature that customers have been asking for is support for Jumbo Frames and this is usually in the context of setting up either an NSX-V or NSX-T environment.

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Thunderbolt 3 enclosures with (Single, Dual & Quad) M.2 NVMe SSDs for ESXi

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Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) and eventually USB 4 is a really fascinating technology and I believe it still has so much untapped potential, especially when looking at Remote/Branch Office (ROBO), Edge and IoT types of deployments. TB3 was initially limited to Apple-based platforms, but in the last couple of years, adoption has been picking up across a number of PC desktop/laptops including the latest generations of Intel NUCs which are quite popular for vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Labs. My hope with USB 4 is that in the near future, we will start to see servers with this interface show up in the datacenter 🙂

In the mean time, I have been doing some work with TB3 from a home lab standpoint. Some of you may have noticed my recent work on enabling Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE for ESXi and it should be no surprise that the next logical step was TB3 storage. Using a Thunderbolt interface to connect to external storage, usually Fibre Channel is something many of our customers have been doing for quite some time. In fact, I have a blog post from a few years back which goes over some of the solutions customers have implemented, the majority use case being Virtualizing MacOS on ESXi for iOS/MacOS development. These solutions were usually not cheap and involved a sizable amount of infrastructure (e.g. storage arrays, network switches, etc) but worked very well for large vSphere/MacOS based environments.

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