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Quick Tip - vSphere Web Client Recent History Feature

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A customer who was also a former colleague of mines reached out to me a few days ago asking about a feature request that he would like to see in the new vSphere Web Client, which is the ability to view the recent history of inventory objects that he had navigated through. He explained that using the Inventory Navigator on the left pane of the vSphere Web Client, you can only go back to the previous inventory object.

The feature he was looking for is similar to the history feature of a web browser where you can view your recently visited websites. I know for new users of the vSphere Web Client, this is a must have feature as you are getting familiar with the new Web Client and the Inventory Navigator. This feature was actually something I and others within VMware pushed hard for while vSphere 5.1 was still in development and I knew that this feature (also known as breadcrumb) was available.

However, it might not have been obvious on where to access the recent history feature. At the very top of the Inventory Navigator, there is a tiny drop down arrow next to the selected inventory object. If you click on that, you will get a list of your recently visited inventory objects.

Once I provided the screenshot, it was exactly what he was looking for. This really comes in handy when you are jumping around and with a single click, you can easily navigate back to a previous object.

Quick Tip - How to Change ESXi SSH Prompt

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This quick tip was motivated by a comment from Jason Nash where he wished the hostname of an ESXi host is automatically displayed on the SSH prompt when logging into the system. Traditionally, systems providing SSH access will default the SSH prompt to use the format of [username@hostname current-working-directory], but for an ESXi host, it just displays the current working directory.

This is not that big of an issue, unless you have multiple connections opened up to various systems which is usually the case for the average System Administrator. Being able to quickly identify the host you on are without having to run the hostname command would be nice and I can see why Jason would want to have this. Having said that, this is something you can easily configure on ESXi as well as other UNIX/Linux system in terms of customizing the SSH prompt.

To change the SSH prompt on ESXi, you will need to edit /etc/profile.local configuration file and add PS1 environmental variable which controls the SSH prompt. The configuration file is automatically backed up and all changes will persist through a reboot.

If you want to enable the basic [username@hostname current-working-directory], add the following to the file:

PS1="[\u@\h:\w] "

Now when you login to your ESXi host, the SSH prompt will look like this:

You can even add colors to your SSH prompt, if you add the following to the file:

PS1="\e[0;41m[\u@\h \W]\$ \e[m"

It will look like this:

The above are just examples of the customization you can apply to the SSH prompt, for more options you can take a look at this reference or search for others online. You can also quickly test your changes by just setting the PS1 variable on the command-line and then logging in.

Since this is something that has annoyed me from time to time, I will be filing a Feature Request with engineering and hopefully we can have this as a default in the future. Thanks Jason for bringing this up!

How to run Nested RHEV Hypervisor on ESXi?

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I have written a number of articles about VMware Nested Virtualization and even today, I am still surprised at how easy it is to virtualize not only our own hypervisor but other vendor's hypervisors as well. This week I received an interesting question from my old Technical Marketing colleague Rawlinson Rivera who wanted to run a nested RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) Hypervisor on ESXi. This was not something I had done before nor had any interest in doing and I told Rawlinson that it should technically work as long as the guestOS is enabled with VHV.

Rawlinson's attempt at installing RHEV resulted in the VM hanging after boot up. After a bit of research, it turns out some additional tweaks are required to get RHEV running on ESXi. I would like to give a huge thanks to Jim Mattson, one of the VMware developers who help made Nested Virtualization possible, for his assistance.

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

Here are the instructions on creating a virtual machine that can be used to install RHEV (make sure you follow these exact steps, the VM must be created with these settings or it will not work):

Step 1 - Download RHEV 6.3 or 6.4 from Red Hat's website

Step 2 - Create a new Virtual Machine (vHW9) and when you get to the OS selection, you will need to select the following:

Guest Family - Other
Guest Version - Other (64-bit)

Step 3 - When you get to the virtual hardware customization, make sure you select LSI Logic SAS for the SCSI controller and also enable VHV under the CPU option.

Step 4 - Finally, you will need to add the following two advanced virtual machine settings:
vcpu.hotadd = false
apic.xapic.enable = false

Step 5 - Mount the RHEV ISO and once the VM starts to boot up, when you are presented with install/upgrade options, hit the TAB key. This will allow you to change the boot parameters and you will need to move your cursor to the left and remove "quiet" from the command-line which is right after the install keyword and then hit enter.

Note: This is required due to a known issue from Red Hat.

Step 6 - If everything was successful, you should be prompted with RHEV installer:

Step 7 - Once the installer has completed and you reboot, you now have nested RHEV running on ESXi!

Now it is time to delete the VM 😉