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Quick Tip - Updating Intel ixgben driver enables Multi-gigabit (2.5gbE / 5GbE) selection in ESXi

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Here is a nice protip from one of my readers, Peter, who recently came across an issue with an Intel x550 network adaptor and ESXi not listing any of the Multi-gigabit (2.5GbE or 5GbE) options even though his underlying physical network was setup as 2.5GbE, only 100MBps, 1GbE and 10GbE was available.

After a bit of trial/error, he discovered the solution was to update the inbox version of the Intel ixgben driver (1.7.1.44-1vmw.803.0.0.24022510) to the latest supported version for ESXi 8.x and he immediately saw the additional Multi-gigabit speeds as shown in his screenshot below:

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Incorrect guestOS type for Nested ESXi causes vCLS issues with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Holodeck Toolkit

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Several months back, I started noticing an increase number of folks reporting problems powering on their vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) VM when using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Holodeck Toolkit solution and the following workaround can be applied, which came directly from the Holodeck developers.

While a workaround exists including vCLS script located at C:\VLC\VLC-Holo-Site-1\vclsfix, it was very puzzling because this seems to only happen with the Nested ESXi VMs and the VCF Holodeck Toolkit and it was NOT observed when deploying a regular Nested ESXi environment, but I never took a closer look to see why that might be.

A few weeks back, I recieved an email from Mike Foley (former vSphere HA and vCLS PM), I came to learn the reason folks using the VCF Holodeck Toolkit was seeing this problem and it was specific to that solution due to how the guestOS was configured for the Nested ESXi VMs.

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Retrieving CPU Microcode revision from ESXi in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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Whether you are applying a CPU microcode update through a hardware vendor's BIOS update or an ESXi update/upgrade, verifying the CPU microcode revision within ESXi is not as easy as it could be.

Today, if you wanted to get the current CPU microcode revision from ESXi, you would need to enable SSH and then use the vsish interface to retrieve this information by running the following command:

vsish -e cat /hardware/cpu/cpuList/0 | grep "microcode" -A2

While you can retrieve the CPU microcode revision, the method and required interfaces was less than ideal, especially at scale. Given ESXi already exposes a number CPU attributes via the ESXCLI interface, which includes programmatic access when using PowerCLI, I thought it would be a nice feature to also include the CPU microcode revision as part of the output and had filed an internal feature enhancement a few years back.

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