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Quick Tip - Adding a vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) to a Nested ESXi VM

05.13.2022 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I had an interesting question this morning asking whether it was possible to add a vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) to a Nested ESXi VM? The user was interested in testing a particular scenario with the new vSphere Trust Authority feature that was introduced in the vSphere 7.0. I personally had not done much with vTPM and I had assumed it should just work as long as you have a physical TPM chip in the underlying hardware and you have setup either a Standard or Native Key Provider within your vCenter Server.

The user observed that adding a vTPM to a Windows VM was possible using the vSphere UI but when attempting to perform the same operation on a Nested ESXi VM, the option to add vTPM device was not available. After spending ~30 minutes asking around for hardware that had a physical TPM, I remember that my Quartz Canyon NUC (NUC 9 Pro) is a Xeon based system and it has TPM 2.0 chip. I was able to take a closer look and quickly found the solution was very pretty straight forward!

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Nested Virtualization, vSphere Tags // Nested ESXi, TPM, vTPM

Updates to Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance for vSphere 7.0 Update 3

10.05.2021 by William Lam // 16 Comments

✔️Corrected vSphere 7.0 Update 3 Release Note URLs

🔸vCenter:https://t.co/pQxSj5ltxk

🔹ESXihttps://t.co/qrKrtmo87c https://t.co/oYMMWVWmWy

— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) October 5, 2021

vSphere 7.0 Update 3 officially GA'ed this morning and I am happy to share a quick that my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance (OVA and Content Library) has also been updated to support the latest release. In addition, I have also published an update to the ESXi 7.0 Update 2a Virtual Appliance as there was an issue that prevented it from working with the latest VMware Cloud Foundation 4.x release.

Nested ESXi OVA:

  • ESXi 7.0 Update 2a Virtual Appliance
  • ESXi 7.0 Update 3 Virtual Appliance

Nested ESXi Content Library:

  • https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/lib.json

For prior ESXi versions, you can check out http://vmwa.re/nestedesxi

Categories // Automation, ESXi, Nested Virtualization, vSphere 7.0 Tags // Nested ESXi, nested virtualization, vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, vSphere 7.0 Update 3

Automated Lab Deployment Script for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2

05.26.2021 by William Lam // 37 Comments

One of my pet projects that I have been looking into is to easily deploy the required infrastructure, using Nested ESXi of course, to be able to quickly standup a "basic" VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment. There are a couple of solutions that currently exists in the community that can help take a user from having no infrastructure to setting up all the components required to standup a complete functional VCF envionmrent, similar to that of a physical VCF deployment. As such, the pre-requisites for using those tools was a bit more than what I was looking for and can also feel overwhelming for a new user. I certainly fell into that category while looking at some of the existing tools.

Ultimately, my use case was slightly different and I also did not need all the bells and whistles such as configuring Application Virtual Networks (VCN) and this also meant that I could dramatically simplify the deployment. For example, instead of deploying the ESXi hosts from scratch, I could simply take advantage of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and use that as a starting point. For those familiar with my various PowerCLI automated lab deployment scripts, I have created a simliar experience for VCF that will deploy a set of Nested ESXi Appliances along with the VMware Cloud Builder appliance, which is then used to deploy VCF on top of the Nested ESXi VMs. To ensure the user experience is as painless and simple, I also use the customer supplied configurations within the script to automagically generate the VCF configuration JSON file that can then be uploaded directly to the Cloud Builder appliance to begin the VCF deployment once the initial infrastructure has been deployed by the automation script.

Note: Although AVN and the respective NSX-T configuration is not in scope for the automation script, it is definitely possible to use a solution like VyOS or pfSense and using techniques like the following to automate the additional infrastructure to enable the ability to deploy a complete VCF environment. I will leave this as as fun and interesting learning exercise for the reader.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Nested Virtualization, PowerCLI, VMware Cloud Foundation Tags // VMware Cloud Foundation

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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Recent

  • Automating the vSAN Data Migration Pre-check using vSAN API 06/04/2025
  • VCF 9.0 Hardware Considerations 05/30/2025
  • VMware Flings is now available in Free Downloads of Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) 05/19/2025
  • VMUG Connect 2025 - Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x in a Box  05/15/2025
  • Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) 05/06/2025

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