The highly anticipated vSphere 6.7 Update has officially GA'ed! Below is an aggregation of all the related release notes and downloads for this vSphere release. I have also created a short URL which you can use to access this exact same page using vmwa.re/vsphere67u1
The downloads are currently being staged, so please be patient.
vCenter Server 6.7u1
ESXi 6.7u1
vSAN 6.7u1
I recently acquired a new toy for the home lab thanks to Timo Sugliani who shared an article on Twitter a few weeks back for a new USB-based enclosure that supports an NVMe SSD device using the M.2 form factor.
Trying to see if I can get this new toy working 😁 pic.twitter.com/0o4jLng72M
— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) September 27, 2018
I was excited to give the accessory a try, especially as the M.2 devices are used regularly for vSphere home labs running on either the Intel NUCs or Supermicro E200-8D. Most of these platforms only support a single M.2 slot and this is an easy way to add additional high performance storage capacity with a small footprint. The other benefit with an external enclosure is that you now have a portable and reliable storage solution that can easily be moved from system to system, especially for those that have asked about running VMFS on USB-based device.
If you have ever spent any time using the vSphere API, you probably have heard of or have used the vSphere Managed Objected Browser (MOB) which is an extremely useful learning and debugging tool when working with the vSphere API. The vSphere MOB is accessed through a web browser connecting to either vCenter Server or ESXi and provides a graphical interface, allowing you to discovery/explore the underlying vSphere API and its data in a very intuitive manner.
As an avid user of the VSAN Management API since its release, I have always wanted something similar, especially when I first got started. I was quite happy when I found out in vSphere 6.7 and VSAN 6.7, the VSAN team has added a VSAN MOB interface directly on ESXi, for the VSAN specific APIs that are available only on an ESXi host. Just like the vSphere MOB which is also available on ESXi host, it is disabled by default and must be enabled.
The following ESXCLI commands can be used to enable/disable the VSAN MOB on ESXi 6.7:
esxcli vsan debug mob start
esxcli vsan debug mob stop
However, when I tried to enable the VSAN MOB, I ran into the following error message:
hostname 'localhost.localdomain' doesn't match '192.168.30.10'
It turns out there is an issue where it fails to match the IP Address of the ESXi host to the default localhost.localdomain and hence it fails to start the VSAN MOB. This issue is fixed in the upcoming vSphere & VSAN 6.7 Update 1, but in the mean time, there is a workaround.