WilliamLam.com

Custom UEFI Boot Menu for ESXi 9.0 using rEFInd

by // 8 Comments

Unless I am working with an unreleased version of ESXi, I usually install it by booting from a USB drive that includes an embedded Kickstart configuration file, that will fully automate the installation.

For a single ESXi host deployment, this workflow works great but if you have more than one host with different ESXi Kickstart configuration files, you will either need multiple USB drives or you have to keep updating the embedded Kickstart file reference using a single USB device.

There are a number of different ways to solve this problem, I have covered many of the solutions in my Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation at Scale session at VMware Explore.

With that said, since I have been deploying several Minisforum MS-A2 for use with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, I wanted to explore a solution that had been requested in the past but I never had the time to look into, which is creating a custom ESXi boot menu that would allow you to select specific ESXi version and/or kickstart configuration files.

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Disable ESX Live Patching enforcement to enable vSphere Supervisor

by // Leave a Comment

While enabling the vSphere Supervisor on my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 setup, I came across an error I had not seen before as I have performed this numerous times across both vSphere 8.x and vSphere 9.0:

A general system error occurred: Solution specification in the image are incompatible with hosts 'esx02.vcf.lab, esx01.vcf.lab'


I was going through various vCenter Server logs files, but was not able to find anything useful and the strangest part was the vSphere Supervisor Service was already up and running but something about incompatibility and image.

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - VCF 9.0 Versioning Scheme

by // 2 Comments

I was answering a question the other day from a customer who had noticed the way they had fetched the version of ESXi (vmware -vl) in the ESXi Shell had been deprecated with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, as you can see from the screenshot below.


This brought back some fond memories for me as this was a command I had used back in the original ESX Service Console as a quick way to retrieve both the version and release level for an ESX(i) host.

While the vmware utility can still be used with VCF 9.0, the replacement command-line argument for -vl is -r for release and here is an example of what that output would look like:


With VCF 9.0, VMware has introduced a new versioning model for its unified software releases. As a result, various means including utilities and APIs for fetching the software version has been updated to reflect the new versioning scheme.

The next obvious question you might ask, what is the new versioning scheme?

[Read more...]