Several months back I had built an ESXi Virtual Appliance that allows anyone to quickly stand up a fully functional Nested ESXi VM which includes guest customization such as networking, NTP, syslog, passwords, etc. The virtual appliance was initially built for my own personal use as I found myself constantly rebuilding my lab environment for evaluating and breaking new VMware software. I figured if this was useful for myself, it probably could benefit others at VMware and I posted the details internally on our Socialcast forum. Since then, I have received numerous stories on how helpful the ESXi Virtual Appliance has been for both our Field and Engineering for setting up demos, POCs, evaluations, etc.
Heads Up - Workaround for changing Mac OS X VM display resolution in vSphere & Fusion
For customers who are running Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) or newer in a Virtual Machine, you may have noticed that you can no longer set a custom display resolution beyond the default 1024x768 in either VMware Fusion and vSphere, regardless of the amount of video memory that has been allocated. The reason for this behavior is that Apple has changed the way in which it remembers previously used modes and would automatically fall back to this versus retaining the custom mode using the Display Preferences. Given this is a non-trivial fix, VMware Engineering has been working hard on a providing a workaround which would still allow users to set a custom resolution from within the GuestOS.
The workaround that has been developed is a tiny standalone command-line utility called vmware-resolutionSet which runs within the Mac OS X Guest and allows you to configure a custom display resolution. You will need to ensure you have VMware Tools installed and running before you can use this utility. As of right now, customers can get a hold of this utility by filing an SR with VMware Support and referencing PR 1385761. Although this tool has not been officially released and must go through the standard release process, the plan is to include it in a future update of VMware Tools and will available for use with both VMware Fusion and vSphere.
UPDATE (12/11/15) - Thanks to reader @elvisizer, it looks like the latest VMware Fusion 8.1 release now includes an updated version of VMware Tools (10.0.5) which includes the vmware-resolutionSet utility. You can find it under '/Library/Application Support/VMware Tools'. One thing to note is that there is a known issue right now for VMware Fusion 8.1 related to NAT and port forwarding, you may want to hold off on upgrading if you rely on this feature.
The syntax for the vmware-resolutionSet utility is pretty straight forward, it accepts a width and height argument. Make sure to use "sudo" if you want the display resolution to persist through a system reboot. For example, to set a 1920x1080 resolution, you would run the following command:
./vmware-resolutionSet 1920 1080
Note: Ensure you have sufficient video memory configured for your VM for larger display resolutions. In the example above, I have 16MB configured for my Mac OS X VM which would give you a max resolution of 2560x1600.
If everything was successful, you should see that both the "Requested resolution" and the "Effective resolution" match in the output. If output does not match, it most likely means you need to increase the video memory and you can refer to this VMware KB 1003 for more details. If we take a look at our Mac OS X VM, we should now see that our new custom display has taken effect. Below is a screenshot of a Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) running on vSphere 6.0 Update 1 configured with a 1920x1080 resolution.
One other thing to note is if you plan on using higher display resolution than 2560x1600, you may need to configure some additional VM Advanced Settings due to use of framebuffers that are larger than 16MB. In this case, you would need to also add the following two advanced settings to the VM which can be done using the vSphere Web/C# Client or the vSphere API. For example, if I want a 2880x1800 display resolution, I would add the following:
svga.maxWidth = "2880"
svga.maxHeight = "1800"
Lastly, I would like to give a big thanks to Michael Udaltsov, the Engineer who is responsible for creating the workaround and providing me with some additional context to this change in behavior. I know our customers will greatly appreciate this workaround!
Building minimal vSphere demo lab using VMware Fusion/Workstation with only 8GB memory?
After tweeting this update last week, I received quite a few questions on how I was able to squeeze a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) & ESXi 6.0 Update 1 along with a VMware Photon VM, all running on my Mac Book Air with only 8GB of memory. Although, I was not able to make use of my demo which was for my vSphere Content Library session at VMworld Europe this week; I thought I would still share the details on how I built this vSphere lab environment which could come in handy for others.
I was able to squeeze VCSA 6.0 & ESXi 6.0 Update 1 & Photon VM on Mac Book Air w/only 8GB of memory. Chrome & terminal ran fine as well!
— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) October 7, 2015
I wanted to run everything on my Mac Book Air primarily for the convenience factor so I did not have to bring my Mac Mini which may not be ideal for traveling aboard. The performance and responsiveness of the environment was actually pretty good and I was able to also access the vSphere Web Client using Google Chrome as well as OS X terminal for CLI operations without any problems. It definitely helps if you place all VMs on SSDs, which is especially useful if swapping occurs since we are overcommitting the physical memory.
Below are the instructions for building this environment and here is a quick summary of the expected memory configuration for the three VMs.
| Virtual Machine | Memory |
|---|---|
| Embedded vCenter Server Appliance VM | 5GB |
| ESXi VM | 3GB |
| Photon VM | 384 MB |
Step 1 - Download the VCSA & ESXi 6.0 Update 1 ISO (or any other version you wish to run). You will need to extract the contents of VCSA ISO and the OVA is located in /vcsa/vmware-vcsa and you will need to add the .ova extension.
Step 2 - We will need to configure memory overcommitment for VMware Fusion/Workstation to allow for the majority of the memory to be swapped to be able to run our minimal vSphere environment. You will need to set the value of prefvmx.minVmMemPct to 25 by adding the following line to the respective configuration file shown in the table below.
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = 25
| Hypervisor | Configuration File |
|---|---|
| VMware Workstation | C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini |
| VMware Fusion | /Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/config |
Step 3 - Deploy the VCSA OVA to either your VMware Fusion or Workstation deployment and ensure you do not power on the VM. We will need to make the following edits to the VCSA's VMX file to ensure it is properly configured when it is powered on. Below is an example of the VMX parameters you will need to add before powering on the VM.
guestinfo.cis.deployment.node.type = "embedded"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.domain-name = "vghetto.local"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.site-name = "vghetto"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.password = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr.family = "ipv4"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr = "192.168.1.54"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.pnid = "192.168.1.54"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.prefix = "24"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.mode = "static"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.dns.servers = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.gateway = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.passwd = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.ssh.enabled = "true"
Step 5 - Once the VCSA has successfully been configured and you can connect to it using the vSphere Web Client, you can then power it off and reduce the memory from 8GB to 5GB.
Step 4 - Create a new VM using the ESXi 6.x GuestOS type for running your Nested ESXi VM and stick with the defaults of 4GB of memory to be able to install ESXi. Once the VM has been created, go ahead and install ESXi using the ISO as you normally would.
Step 5 - Once the ESXi VM has successfully been installed and booted up, you can then power it off and reduce the memory from 4GB to 3GB.
Step 6 (Optional) - If you wish to play with VMware Photon, you can also install Photon using the ISO which can be downloaded from here or deploy using the OVA which can be downloaded from here.
For folks who have more memory in their system, you could add an additional two Nested ESXi VMs to then run a full VSAN setup and then you will have a pretty powerful, with minimal resource footprint that you can bring with you anywhere to run demos or for development and testing purposes. I also highly recommend making use of the "Suspend" operation when you need to quickly get access to memory or run other applications and this also allows you to quickly resume the entire environment in just a few seconds without having to power down the entire setup which will take much longer.
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