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New Nested ESXi 6.x Content Library 

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A few years back I had showed how you could create and host your own 3rd Party vSphere Content Library which allows customers to decouple their content from the underlying vSphere environment and centralizing their content and making it available to number of vCenter Servers by simply just having an HTTP(s) endpoint. The other huge benefit is being able to take advantage of the existing web content tools for optimizing delivery or retrieval whether that is replication, caching, etc. and not relying a single vCenter Server for providing Content Library publication. In addition to showing how to create your own content libraries, I also had built my own 3rd Party vSphere Content Library which contains a variety of my Nested ESXi Templates (empty VM shells) running on Amazon S3 which can be consumed by anyone as long as you are running vCenter Server 6.0 or newer.

Although the empty Nested ESXi Templates were quite useful for myself and customers, it would have also been nice to include my pre-built Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances which I had recently updated to support vSphere 6.0 Update 3 and vSphere 6.5d (vSAN 6.6). Thanks to Dana Nourie, who runs our wildly popular VMware Flings Program, was kind enough to help me with the content hosting and now anyone can also subscribe to my Nested ESXi VA's and automatically have the content sync down using the vSphere Content Library feature.

UPDATE 1 (07/31/17) - The Nested ESXi Content Library has been updated to include the latest ESXi 6.5 Update 1 VA. If you are already subscribing to the library, it should have already pulled down the content (or at least the metadata which you can then force synchronization) or you can simply subscribe to the library and have access to the latest ESXi VA.

UPDATE 2 (05/07/18) - The Nested ESXi Content Library has been updated to include the latest ESXi 6.5 Update 2 VA. If you are already subscribing to the library, it should have already pulled down the content (or at least the metadata which you can then force synchronization) or you can simply subscribe to the library and have access to the latest ESXi VA.

To get started, just create a new vSphere Content Library and enter the following subscription URL: https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/lib.json 


You can either download the content immediately or only when you need to use it. I recommend the former since its only two images which totals up to a whopping 1GB 😉

Once the creation of the Content Library has been completed, you should see the following two Nested ESXi VAs in the library which are now ready for deployment!


For more information about the Nested ESXi 6.0u3/6.5d VA's and how they work, please have a look at this blog post here. For more information about the Nested ESXi Templates and how to subscribe to the 3rd Party vSphere Content Library, please have a look at this blog post here.

Managing ESXi Embedded Host Client settings

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There was a question the other day about managing ESXi Embedded Host Client (EHC) settings which you can find by click on the logged-in username and navigating to the "Settings" section as shown in the screenshot below. Customers can manage things like the default VM Console used whether that is the HTML5 VMRC or the Standalone VMRC to auto-refresh and even sharing usage information to help improve the product back to VMware.


In addition to configuring the EHC settings within UI, you can also manage them via automation using the vSphere API and any one of your favorite vSphere SDK/CLIs. The EHC settings are exposed as a set of ESXi Advanced Settings as shown in the screenshot below. These settings are applied on a per-ESXi basis and NOT on a per-user basis.


Below is a table that summarizes the 7 different EHC settings which you can programmatically query to retrieve their current value, default value and whether they have been overridden simliar to what the UI provides today.

Key Description Default Value
UserVars.HostClientCEIPOptIn  Whether or not to opt-in for CEIP in Host Client: 0 for ask 1 for yes 2 for no 0
UserVars.HostClientDefaultConsole  Default console type in Host Client webmks
UserVars.HostClientEnableMOTDNotification  Whether or not to enable MOTD notification on login for Host Client 1
UserVars.HostClientEnableVisualEffects  Whether or not to enable visual effects for Host Client 1
UserVars.HostClientSessionTimeout  Default timeout for Host Client sessions in seconds 900
UserVars.HostClientShowOnlyRecentObjects  Whether or not to show only recent objects in Host Client 1
UserVars.HostClientWelcomeMessage  Welcome message displayed on login in Host Client  Welcome to {{hostname}}

Note: The language settings is based on your browser settings which you can overridden, but it looks like we may not have exposed that as a configurable setting via automation.

Automating the new native VCSA bootstrap "Easy Install" in vSAN 6.6

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In case you missed the previous article, have a read here which goes into greater detail behind the new VCSA bootstrap installer (also known as vSAN Easy Install) which is part of the new vSAN 6.6 release. As I hinted at the end of the previous post, customers not only have a simplified way of bootstrapping the VCSA on vSAN from a UI standpoint but they can also completely automate this leveraging some of the new vSAN Management 6.6 APIs, which are the same APIs that the UI uses.

A new Managed Object called VsanVcsaDeployerSystem is now available when connecting to either a standalone ESXi host as well as a vCenter Server. It contains the following three methods:

Here is the workflow for automating the VCSA bootstrap installer:

Step 1 - Connect directly to the ESXi host which you wish to bootstrap vSAN. You will use the VsanPrepareVsanForVcsa() API which accepts a list of disks for either a Hybrid or All-Flash vSAN datastore.

Step 2 - Deploy the VCSA like you normally would using the CLI Installer. You will specify the ESXi host that you had just prepared in Step 1 which includes the vSAN Datastore that was setup as part of that process.

Step 3 - Once the VCSA has been successfully deployed, you will connect to the vCenter Server and use the VsanPostConfigForVcsa() API which will create a vSphere Datacenter, vSphere Cluster and enable it with vSAN (which can also include Dedupe/Compression if you are using an All-Flash setup) and then automatically add the ESXi host that you had just bootstrapped. If you have provisioned other ESXi hosts that have not been configured with vSAN, you can also include that into the API request. The really nice thing about this "post" API is that rather than having to call into several existing vSphere APIs to setup vCenter Server, you can do all of that just using this single API!

To help demonstrate the use of the these new vSAN Management APIs, I have created a simple Python script which exercises these new APIs called vsan-vcsa-deployer-sample.py The script supports three operations: listdisk, prepare and post.

Here is an example of running the listdisk operation which will list all available disks that are currently not in use and can be used by vSAN:

python vsan-vcsa-deployer-sample.py -s 192.168.1.100 -u root -p VMware1! --operation listdisk

Once you have the disks information, you can then use the prepare operation as shown below to bootstrap your ESXi host:

python vsan-vcsa-deployer-sample.py -s 192.168.1.100 -u root -p VMware1! --operation prepare --cache "SAMSUNG MZVPV128" --capacity "Samsung SSD 850"


At this point, you are now ready to deploy the VCSA using the CLI Installer. Once that has completed, you can complete the process by using the post operation and provide the required parameters to setup vCenter Server including the ESXi host that you had just bootstrapped so it can be added to the vCenter Server inventory as shown below:

python vsan-vcsa-deployer-sample.py -s 192.168.1.200 -u '*protected email*' -p VMware1! --operation post --datacenterName "VSAN-Datacenter" --clusterName "VSAN-Cluster" --esxName 192.168.1.100 --esxUsername root --esxPassword VMware1!


Once the post operation has completed, you will have a fully configured vCenter Server which you can check by logging into the vSphere Web Client. Pretty slick, if you ask me!