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Refresher on Nested ESXi Networking Requirements

05.17.2023 by William Lam // 6 Comments

Using Nested Virtualization and specifically Nested ESXi, which is running ESXi inside of a VM, has become so automatic and second nature for me and many in the VMware community, that I sometimes forget we still have brand new users who are experiencing ESXi for the very first time.

Nested ESXi is an extremely powerful capability for so many different use cases from development, testing and general learning purposes. Before jumping in and deploying your Nested ESXi environment, which I highly recommend using my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances, you need to make sure that you have proper networking setup or you will run into all sorts of strange issues. For all VMware Nested Virtualization resources, tips and tricks, you will definitely want to bookmark this page HERE.

Disclaimer: Nested Nested ESXi is not officially supported by VMware and Nested Virtualization is only supported under limited scenarios. For more details, please refer to this VMware KB 2009916.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Nested Virtualization, NSX, vSphere Tags // Nested ESXi, nested virtualization

VMUG Advantage Group Buy is back!

04.18.2023 by William Lam // 4 Comments

With the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 1 yesterday, what better way to enhance your VMware Homelab than getting or renewing your VMUG Advantage!?

๐Ÿฅณ vSphere 8.0 Update 1 is now available! The Release Notes will be up shortly, so be patient

๐Ÿ”ธvCenter
๐Ÿ“’ https://t.co/KVRx5f2stQ
๐Ÿ’ฟ https://t.co/H7hEnuQYlI

๐Ÿ”นESXi
๐Ÿ“’ https://t.co/ZN0oZ6kBDG
๐Ÿ’ฟ https://t.co/imYObEEOz7#vSphere80U1

— William Lam (@*protected email*) (@lamw) April 18, 2023

... Especially as the annual VMUG Advantage Group Buy is back again! ๐Ÿ˜€

[Read more...]

Categories // NSX, VMware Cloud Foundation, VSAN, vSphere Tags // vmug advantage

Removing NSX CPU/Memory reservations when deploying a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Management or Workload Domain

02.22.2023 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Now that you can deploy a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Management Domain onto a single ESXi host for homelab purposes, another challenge that can arise is simply having enough resources to deploy either a Management or Workload Domain.

While you do need to meet some minimum bar in terms of the amount of CPU and memory resources required to run the various components within a VCF Management or Workload Domain, I found that NSX resource requirements does add another challenge. The NSX Unified Appliance comes configured with both CPU and memory reservations, this means unless you can reserve both the required CPU and Memory for NSX,ย you can not power on NSX and the deployment will continue to retry until it eventually gives up.ย 

Again, for a production environment, this is not a problem but for homelab or testing purposes, this can further restrict users from exploring the VCF solution.ย 

I figured why not just reduce or even remove the CPU and memory reservations from the NSX OVA within the VMware Cloud Builder which is responsible for the initial VCF bringup? Well, I quickly found out why as the ISO which contains all the OVA is mounted as read-only ๐Ÿ™‚


Luckily, all hope is not lost and this is where I learned to leverage a neat Linux kernel capability called OverlayFS which can help us! With a bit of trial/error, I was able to remove the CPU and memory reservations from the NSX appliance that is used during the deployment of a VCF Management Domain. In addition, I also ran into the same challenge when deploying a VCF Workload Domain and luckily, that was a much easier solution to figure out.

Disclaimer: This is not supported by VMware, use at your own risk. As of writing this blog post, this trick is functional on latest VCF 4.5 release.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Home Lab, NSX, VMware Cloud Foundation Tags // VMware Cloud Foundation

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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Recent

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