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Happy New Year! ?

I wanted to kick off the new year with something that I had shared at the end of 2022, which was a break down on the number of blog posts that I have published over the years.

A number of folks had reached out asking how they could do the same for their own blogs and so I wanted to share the solution that I had used.

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How to host your own simple ESXi update depot?

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I recently upgraded my single ESXi host, which is used for my personal vSphere Homelab, to the latest patch release of ESXi 7.0 Update 3e using ESXCLI and connecting directly to VMware's online depot.

This is the same method that I have been using since 2012 when I first wrote about this in a blog post using a pretty cool method of upgrading/patching a single ESXi hosts. If you are fortunate to have multiple ESXi hosts and a vCenter Server, you definitely should be using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) provided by vCenter Server rather than the ESXCLI method, especially as there are no upgrade pre-checks built into in compared to vLCM.

Although my environment has a vCenter Server, I can not use vLCM because I only have a single ESXi host and ESXCLI method is really the only viable option. Customers may have a simliar setup, whether that is for a homelab, smaller environment or simply do not have a vCenter Server. Using the ESXCLI workflow, it certainly is the easiest if your ESXi host can reach VMware's online repo which is hosted at hostupdate.vmware.com, however this may not be possible for everyone, especially for remote locations where connectivity may be spotty or simply is not allowed to have outbound connectivity.

For such environments, you might be interested in hosting your own ESXi update repo and as always, I was curious on how one could setup something simliar without much effort and well, here we are with this blog post 😀

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Hiking Trails

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This post is not technology related, so feel free to ignore.

For those that know me or follow me on Twitter, know that I enjoy the outdoors and hiking. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our family would normally go on several hikes a year, usually when there is a long holiday weekend or during the winter break season.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, I came to learn that my buddy Sunny Dua was doing a fun challenge with his son, 30 hikes in a 30 days (IIRC) and I thought that was such a great idea! I figure I would slowly ease my daughter into hiking, especially as she was much younger than Sunny's son. With that, I started hiking with my daughter (late July), doing one hike every Sunday and see where it goes.

As you can see from the tweet below, we really enjoyed our time together and she also reached an amazing milestone concluding 2020 with 20 hikes, totaling 100+miles!

During this time, I also kept a log of all the trails that we had completed and potential trails for the future, especially with so many options within the Bay Area. I have shared this list with friends and colleagues looking for hiking options and I realize I should probably just make it public for anyone that might be interested in checking out a new hike if you live in area or visiting.

Hiking Trails: https://github.com/lamw/hiking

As you can see, we have continued with this tradition (time permitting) and will continue to update the list of trails that we complete as a family.

Total Hikes: 66 (278.67 miles)

  • 2020: 20 (103.3 miles)

  • 2021: 20 (72.09 miles)

  • 2022: 26 (103.28 miles)