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Can you really deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) without DNS and NTP?

10.21.2021 by William Lam // 9 Comments

The simple answer is Yes. Now, you might be wondering why anyone would want to put themselves through the pain without setting up proper DNS and NTP?

Well, not all environments have the luxury of having either outbound connectivity and/or access to basic infrastructure services like DNS and NTP. This may come as a surprise to some, but there are customers out there that need to operate in very unique and constrained environments. One such example of this is typically from customers that need to deploy vSphere in a "dark site" where local infrastructure services like DNS and NTP are not available.


I recently re-validated this deployment model using the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release running on an Intel NUC 11 which had no outbound connectivity and it was only connected to my laptop, which also had no outbound connectivity or access to DNS or NTP. Since this question recently came up from a customer who was looking to automate this, so I ran through the deployment workflow using the VCSA CLI Installer but this should also be possible with VCSA UI Installer as the same options are supported.

OK, so how do you make this work?

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, VCSA, vSphere 7.0 Tags // dns, ntp, vcenter server appliance, vcsa

How to programmatically retrieve vCenter Server Patch & Update History?

10.08.2021 by William Lam // 3 Comments

Homelab just upgraded successfully to vSphere 7.0 Update 3!

I really appreciate the “History” view to be able to see all the updates/patches that have been applied for your vCenter Server. Its the little things pic.twitter.com/Go9eicpeSp

— William Lam (@lamw) October 7, 2021

After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release, I was just looking at the "History" tab within the Virtual Machine Management Interface (VAMI), which gives you a historical view of all the patches and updates that have been applied to your vCenter Server since its initial deployment. I am not exactly sure when this was feature was introduced, but it can definitely be useful for both auditing but also debugging/troubleshooting purposes.

Of course, I was curious about this information and wanted to see if I could retrieve it using something like PowerCLI. However when I started to look for the API, I realized that there may not be a public API for this ... but that did not stopped me and taking a look at Chrome Developer, I quickly saw the endpoint which was /rest/appliance/update/history and I was able to figure out a workaround giving the same data.

Below are two examples on accessing this data using either PowerShell or cURL

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, PowerCLI, VCSA, vSphere 7.0 Tags // vSphere 7.0

VCSA 7.0 Update 2 Upgrade Issue - Exception occurred in install precheck phase

03.09.2021 by William Lam // 33 Comments

Like most folks, I was excited about the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 2 and I was ready to upgrade my personal homelab, which was running on vSphere 7.0 Update 1c. However, after starting my VCSA upgrade in the VAMI UI, it quickly failed with the following error message: Exception occurred in install precheck phase

Joy … I just attempted to upgrade my VCSA (7.0u1c) in my personal homelab to #vSphere70Update2 and ran into “Exception occurred in install precheck phase” … pic.twitter.com/4mkvxHxdRl

— William Lam (@lamw) March 9, 2021

Given the release had just GA'ed less than an hour ago and everyone was probably hammering the site, I figured I would wait and then try again.

[Read more...]

Categories // VCSA, vSphere 7.0 Tags // vcsa, vSphere 7.0 Update 2

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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 technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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