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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

Updated Nested ESXi Appliances for 7.0 Update 1d & 2a

05.17.2021 by William Lam // 5 Comments

I have just updated my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance collection to include support for the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1d and 7.0 Update 2a releases. This took a bit longer than usual due to a busy schedule but also due to some fixes and enhancements that I had been working on. For those interested, you can find the detailed change log below and these updates are only applicable for these two OVAs or newer going forward.

Downloads:

  • Nested ESXi Appliance 7.0 Update 1d
  • Nested ESXi Appliance 7.0 Update 2a

Changes

  • Fixed self-sign TLS certificate generation (Subject Alternative Name now matches the provided FQDN)
  • Updated NTP settings to use ESXCLI for configuration (previously updating ntp.conf)
  • Suppressed Core Dump warning (/UserVars/SuppressCoredumpWarning)
  • Updated ESXi installation VMDK from 4 to 12GB to support ESX-OS Data & VMFS Volume
  • Automatically configure ESX-OS Data & 4GB VMFS volume
  • Disabled Follow Hardware MAC by default (/Net/FollowHardwareMac)
  • Follow Hardware MAC can now be configured using OVF property guestinfo.followmac
  • Automatically recreate vmk0 interface to ensure unique MAC Address from vmnic0
  • Automatically configure vMotion traffic on vmk0

For previous Nested ESXi Appliance OVAs and/or the Nested ESXi Content Library, please take a look at http://vmwa.re/nestedesxi

Categories // ESXi, Nested Virtualization, vSphere 7.0 Tags // ESXi 7.0 Update 1d, ESXi 7.0 Update 2a, Nested ESXi

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Author

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

  • Ultimate Lab Resource for VCF 9.0 06/25/2025
  • VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on ASUS NUC 15 Pro (Cyber Canyon) 06/25/2025
  • VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on Minisforum MS-A2 06/25/2025
  • VCF 9.0 Offline Depot using Synology 06/25/2025
  • Deploying VCF 9.0 on a single ESXi host? 06/24/2025

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