Happy 2025! ? Here is a fun one to kick off the New Year ☺️
Last year, I demonstrated a method for customizing the SMBIOS hardware string using Nested ESXi, but the solution was not perfect and required hacking up a VM ROM file and it was also limited to using the BIOS firmware for your Nested ESXi VM as the behavior for EFI firmware was different.
I was doing some research towards the end of last year and I came across a much more elegant solution that works for both physical and virtual ESXi!
A new version of the ESXi-Arm Fling (V2) was recently released and the major update to the ESXi-Arm V2 Fling is that it is now based on the latest ESXi 8.x codebase, which is currently 8.0 Update 3b. In my blog post, I had hinted there was a small easter egg ? the Engineering team had included in the ESXi-Arm Fling update, which I did not know about until they had mentioned it!
Since no one has officially found the easter egg, I figured it might be time to break the silence and share as I think it can actually benefit some users based on their usage of ESXi, especially from a testing and/or learning perspective such as playing with the vSphere API as just one example.
If you are running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab using Nested ESXi and you attempt an upgrade workflow, you may find the following upgrade pre-check fail with the following message: VSAN SCSI controller is not VMware certified
You might think you are out of luck, but it is actually pretty straight forward to bypass the checks and still allow the upgrade to proceed, something I recently went through myself when upgrading my VCF 5.1.1 environment to the latest 5.2 release.
Note: To use vSAN ESA in VCF, you should configure your Nested ESXi VM to use an NVMe Controller instead of PVSCSI Controller, so its possible that by changing the controller type, you may not run into this error simliar to findings here. You can also override the vSAN HCL JSON with your own custom HCL JSON which includes the PVSCSI controller by following the blog post here and that would also allow you to proceed, but steps below are the easiest as you do not have to do anything special.