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Useful M.2 NVMe accessories for vSphere (VSAN/VMFS) Home Labs

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I recently acquired a new toy for the home lab thanks to Timo Sugliani who shared an article on Twitter a few weeks back for a new USB-based enclosure that supports an NVMe SSD device using the M.2 form factor.

I was excited to give the accessory a try, especially as the M.2 devices are used regularly for  vSphere home labs running on either the Intel NUCs or Supermicro E200-8D. Most of these platforms only support a single M.2 slot and this is an easy way to add additional high performance storage capacity with a small footprint. The other benefit with an external enclosure is that you now have a portable and reliable storage solution that can easily be moved from system to system, especially for those that have asked about running VMFS on USB-based device.

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Nested ESXi on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC)

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I have had a few folks ask about Nested ESXi support on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), so lets get that out of the way first. Nested ESXi is NOT supported by VMware on any of our platforms, whether that is an on-premises or a cloud environment like VMC or any 3rd party vendors that maybe using VMware software. For those wanting an "official" statement on Nested ESXi support, you can refer to KB 2009916.

UPDATE (02/10/20) - Updated my Automated vSphere Lab Deployment Script to support "basic" Nested vSphere environment running on VMC.

Now, we all know Nested ESXi works and it runs extremely well on vSphere. In fact, vSphere is the best platform for running any Hypervisor in a VM. This is also true for VMC, you can run a Nested ESXi VM in an SDDC, however there are some caveats compared to what you would experience in an on-prem environment. Below are some of the caveats to be aware of if you are considering running Nested ESXi on VMC.


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VSAN Managed Object Browser (MOB) in vSphere 6.7 & vSphere 6.7 Update 1

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If you have ever spent any time using the vSphere API, you probably have heard of or have used the vSphere Managed Objected Browser (MOB) which is an extremely useful learning and debugging tool when working with the vSphere API. The vSphere MOB is accessed through a web browser connecting to either vCenter Server or ESXi and provides a graphical interface, allowing you to discovery/explore the underlying vSphere API and its data in a very intuitive manner.

As an avid user of the VSAN Management API since its release, I have always wanted something similar, especially when I first got started. I was quite happy when I found out in vSphere 6.7 and VSAN 6.7, the VSAN team has added a VSAN MOB interface directly on ESXi, for the VSAN specific APIs that are available only on an ESXi host. Just like the vSphere MOB which is also available on ESXi host, it is disabled by default and must be enabled.

The following ESXCLI commands can be used to enable/disable the VSAN MOB on ESXi 6.7:

esxcli vsan debug mob start
esxcli vsan debug mob stop

However, when I tried to enable the VSAN MOB, I ran into the following error message:

hostname 'localhost.localdomain' doesn't match '192.168.30.10'


It turns out there is an issue where it fails to match the IP Address of the ESXi host to the default localhost.localdomain and hence it fails to start the VSAN MOB. This issue is fixed in the upcoming vSphere & VSAN 6.7 Update 1, but in the mean time, there is a workaround.

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