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Functional USB-C Ethernet Adapter for ESXi 5.5, 6.0 & 6.5

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While attending an offsite this week, there were some discussions amongst my colleagues about their new Apple Mac Pro and its USB-C only ports. The discussion was completely unrelated to work, however that did get me thinking about the USB-C peripheral market and specifically their ethernet adapters. While searching online, I came across several new USB-C to gigabit ethernet adapters that were now available and one in particular that was very interesting, was the Plugable USB-C to 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN Network Adapter. What caught my eye about this specific network adapter was that it uses the exact same ASIX AX88179 driver as my USB 3.0 to Ethernet Adapter ESXi VIBs were built off of! There was a good chance this might just work.


As you can probably guess, I was pretty excited and quickly ordered one of the Plugable USB-C Ethernet Adapters. The next challenge was getting access to a system that has a USB-C port. After asking around, I finally got my hands on a Dell XPS 13 which has a USB-C port that I could use for a few days. Funny enough, the Dell laptop only has USB 3.0 and USB-C ports, so the first challenge was to disable Secure Boot since I had built a custom ESXi 6.5 image that included my USB 3.0 Ethernet Adapter VIB. Below are the ESXi VIBs or offline bundles that will be required for this solution.

UPDATE (02/12/19) - A new VMware Native Driver for USB-based NICs has just been released, please use this driver going forward.

Please see this blog post for more detailed instructions on installing the VIB as well as accessing the vusbX pNIC.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Use at your own risk.

Once I got ESXi up and running, I was disappointed to see that the USB-C device was not being detected. I had tried a few more things but nothing worked and I decided to sleep on it. The next morning, I realize maybe there was some additional settings that needed to be tweaked in the BIOS. With a bit of trial/error, I found out that you needed to enable the "Thunderbolt Boot Support" which apparently is disabled by default, at least on this Dell system. Below is a screenshot of the BIOS USB/Thunderbolt Settings and this was the only change required from the system defaults.


Once I rebooted, I immediately saw the link up on the USB-C device while ESXi was starting up 😀

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KMIP Server Docker Container for evaluating VM Encryption in vSphere 6.5

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There are a number of vSphere Security enhancements that were introduced in vSphere 6.5 including the much anticipated VM Encryption feature. To be able to use the new VM Encryption feature, you will need to first setup a Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) Server if you do not already have one and associate it with your vCenter Server. There are plenty of 3rd party vendors who provide KMIP solutions that interoperate with the new VM Encryption feature, but it usually can take some time to get access to product evaluations.

During the vSphere Beta, VMware had provided a sample KMIP Server Virtual Appliance based on PyKMIP, which allowed customers to quickly try out the new VM Encryption feature. Many of you have expressed interest in getting access to this appliance for quick evaluational purposes and the team is currently working on providing an updated version of the appliance for customers to access. In the mean time, for those who can not wait for the appliance or would like an alternative way of quickly standing up a sample KMIP Server, I have created a tiny (163 MB) Docker Container which can be easily spun up to provide the KMIP services. I haver published the Docker Container on Docker Hub at lamw/vmwkmip. The beauty of the Docker Container is you do not need to deploy another VM and for resource constrained lab environments or quick demo purposes, you could even run it directly on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) as shown here, obviously not recommended for production use.

The Docker Container bundles the exact same version of PyKMIP that will be included in the virtual appliance, this is just another consumption mechanism. It is also very important to note that you should NOT be using this for any production workloads or any VMs that you care about. For actual production deployments of VM Encryption, you should be leveraging a production grade KMIP Server as PyKMIP stores the encryption keys in memory and will be lost upon a restart. This will also be true even for the virtual appliance, so this is really for quick evaluational purposes.

UPDATE (10/08/22) - The KMIP Docker Container is now available for both x86 and Arm platforms. Simply run docker pull lamw/vmwkmip and the correct architecture will automatically be downloaded.

Note: The version of PyKMIP is a modified version and VMware plans to re-contribute their changes back to the PyKMIP open-source project so others can also benefit.

Below are the instructions on using the KMIP Server Docker Container and how to configure it with your vCenter Server. I will assume you have worked with Docker before, if you have not, please have a look at Docker online resources before continue further or wait for the virtual appliance to be posted.

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Automated vSphere Lab Deployment for vSphere 6.x

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For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you may have seen a few tweets from me hinting at a vSphere deployment script that I have been working on. This was something I had initially built for my own lab use but I figured it probably could benefit the larger VMware community, especially around testing and evaluational purposes. Today, I am please to announce the release of my vGhetto vSphere Lab Deployment (VVLD) scripts which leverages the new PowerCLI 6.5 release which is partly why I needed to wait until it was available before publishing.

There are literally hundreds if not more ways to build and configure a vSphere lab environment. Over the years, I have noticed that some of these methods can be quite complex simply due to their requirements, or incomplete as they only handle specific portion of the deployment or add additional constraints and complexity because they are composed of several other tools and scripts which can make it hard to manage. One of my primary goals for the project was to be able to stand up a fully functional vSphere environment, not just deploying a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) or a couple of Nested ESXi VMs, but rather the entire vSphere stack and have it fully configured and ready for use. I also wanted to develop the scripts using a single scripting language that was not only easy to use, so that others could enhance or extend it further but also with the broadest support into the various vSphere APIs. Lastly, as a stretch goal, I would love to be able to run this script across the different OS platforms.

With these goals in mind, I decided to build these scripts using the latest PowerCLI 6.5 release. Not only is PowerCLI super easy to use, but I was able to immediately benefit from some of the new functionality that was added in the latest PowerCLI release such as the native VSAN cmdlets which I could use a sub-set of the cmdlets against prior releases of vSphere like 6.0 Update 2 for example. Although, not all functionality in PowerCLI has been ported over to PowerCLICore, you can see where VMware is going with it and my hope is that in the very near future, what I have created can one day be executed across all OS platforms whether that is Windows, Linux or Mac OS X and potentially even ARM-based platforms 🙂

Changelog:

  • 11/22/16
    • Automatically handle Nested ESXi on vSAN
  • 01/20/17
    • Resolved "Another task in progress" thanks to Jason M
  • 02/12/17
    • Support for deploying to VC Target
    • Support for enabling SSH on VCSA
    • Added option to auto-create vApp Container for VMs
    • Added pre-check for required files
  • 02/17/17
    • Added missing dvFilter param to eth1 (missing in Nested ESXi OVA)
  • 02/21/17 (All new features added only to the vSphere 6.5 Std deployment)
    • Support for deploying NSX 6.3 & registering with vCenter Server
    • Support for updating Nested ESXi VM to ESXi 6.5a (required for NSX 6.3)
    • Support for VDS + VXLAN VMkernel configuration (required for NSX 6.3)
    • Support for "Private" Portgroup on eth1 for Nested ESXi VM used for VXLAN traffic (required for NSX 6.3)
    • Support for both Virtual & Distributed Portgroup on $VMNetwork
    • Support for adding ESXi hosts into VC using DNS name (disabled by default)
    • Added CPU/MEM/Storage resource requirements in confirmation screen
  • 04/18/18
    • New version of the script vsphere-6.7-vghetto-standard-lab-deployment.ps1 to support vSphere 6.7
    • Added support for vCenter Server 6.7, some of the JSON params have changed for consistency purposes which needed to be updated
    • Added support for new Nested ESXi 6.7 Virtual Appliance (will need to download that first)
    • vMotion is now enabled by default on vmk0 for all Nested ESXi hosts
    • Added new $enableVervoseLoggingToNewShell option which spawns new PowerShell session to provide more console output during VCSA deploy. FR by Christian Mohn
    • Removed dvFilter code, since thats now part of the Nested ESXi VA

Requirements:

  • 1 x Physical ESXi host OR vCenter Server running at least ESXi 6.0 Update 2 or greater
  • PowerCLI 6.5 R1 installed on a Window system
  • Nested ESXi 6.0 or 6.5 Virtual Appliance OVA
  • vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.0 or 6.5 extracted ISO
  • NSX 6.3 OVA (optional)
    • ESXi 6.5a offline patch bundle

Supported Deployments:

The scripts support deploying both a vSphere 6.0 Update 2 as well as vSphere 6.5 environment and there are two types of deployments for each:

  • Standard - All VMs are deployed directly to the physical ESXi host
  • Self Managed - Only the Nested ESXi VMs are deployed to physical ESXi host. The VCSA is then bootstrapped onto the first Nested ESXi VM

Below is a quick diagram to help illustrate the two deployment scenarios. The pESXi in gray is what you already have deployed which must be running at least ESXi 6.0 Update 2. The rest of the boxes is what the scripts will deploy. In the "Standard" deployment, three Nested ESXi VMs will be deployed to the pESXi host and configured with vSAN. The VCSA will also be deployed directly to the pESXi host and the vCenter Server will be configured to add the three Nested ESXi VMs into its inventory. This is a pretty straight forward and basic deployment, it should not surprise anyone. The "Self Managed" deployment is simliar, however the biggest difference is that rather than the VCSA being deployed directly to the pESXi host like the "Standard" deployment, it will actually be running within the Nested ESXi VM. The way that this deployment scenario works is that we will still deploy three Nested ESXi VM onto the pESXi host, however, the first Nested ESXi VM will be selected as a "Bootstrap" node which we will then construct a single-node vSAN to then deploy the VCSA. Once the vCenter Server is setup, we will then add the remainder Nested ESXi VMs into its inventory.

vsphere-6-5-vghetto-lab-deployment-0
For most users, I expect the "Standard" deployment to be more commonly used but for other advanced workflows such as evaluating the new vCenter Server High Availability feature in vSphere 6.5, you may want to use the "Self Managed" deployment option. Obviously, if you select the latter deployment, the provisioning will take longer as you are now "double nested" and depending on your underlying physical resources, this can take quite a bit more time to deploy as well as consume more physical resources as your Nested ESXi VMs must now be larger to accommodate the VCSA. In both scenarios, there is no reliance on additional shared storage, they will both create a three node vSAN Cluster which of course you can expand by simply editing the script.

Deployment Time:

Here is a table breaking down the deployment time for each scenario and vSphere version:

Deployment Type Duration
vSphere 6.5 Standard 36 min
vSphere 6.0 Standard 26 min
vSphere 6.5 Self Managed 47 min
vSphere 6.0 Self Managed 34 min

Obviously, your miles will vary based on your hardware configuration and the size of your deployment.

Scripts:

There are four different scripts which covers the scenarios we discussed above:

Instructions:

Please refer to the Github project here for detailed instructions.

Verification:

Once you have saved all your changes, you can then run the script. You will be provided with a summary of what will be deployed and you can verify that everything is correct before attempting the deployment. Below is a screenshot on what this would look like:

Sample Execution:

Here is an example of running a vSphere 6.5 "Standard" deployment:


Here is an example of running a vSphere 6.5 "Self Managed" deployment:

vsphere-6-5-vghetto-lab-deployment-2
If everything is succesful, you can now login to your new vCenter Server and you should either see the following for a "Standard" deployment:

vsphere-6-5-vghetto-lab-deployment-5
or the following for "Self Managed" deployment:

vsphere-6-5-vghetto-lab-deployment-6
I hope you find these scripts as useful as I do and feel free to enhance these scripts to perform additional functionality or extend them to cover other VMware product deployments such as NSX or vRealize products for example. Enjoy!