WilliamLam.com

Is my vSphere Cluster managed by vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) as a Desired Image or Baseline?

by // 8 Comments

Prior to vSphere 7.0, ESXi lifecycle management has been provided by vSphere Update Manager (VUM), which has been around for more than a decade plus and is most likely what you are still using today. With the release of vSphere 7.0, VMware introduced a brand new lifecycle management solution for ESXi called vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), which you can read more about HERE.


While VMware has made it clear that vLCM will be the future going forward for ESXi lifecycle management, we also understand that most customers will still be using the existing VUM-based solution and we wanted to make sure it was easy to  transition between the two solutions, especially within the vSphere UI.

An interesting question was recently brought up was how to determine whether a vSphere Cluster was using the new vLCM solution based on desired images versus VUM, which uses baselines?

Note: If you are not familiar between vLCM Desired Image and VUM Baselines, be sure to check out this helpful resource HERE.

[Read more...]

How to automate adding a license into vCenter Server with custom label? 

by // Leave a Comment

When adding a license key into vCenter Server using the vSphere UI, users have the ability to provide a custom label that is then associated with that specific license key.


This is certainly more useful than the system default label which uses "License N", where N is an incrementing number.

While the majority of license management can be fully automated using the vCenter Server LicenseManager API, adding a license key with a custom label is unfourntately an operation that is currently not possible with the public API.

With that said, there is a way in which you can still automate this operation 🙂

[Read more...]

Automated ESXi Installation with a USB Network Adapter using Kickstart

by // 2 Comments

I have been working with the Project Keswick team for quite some time now, which is an OCTO project is lead by my good friend Alan Renouf, who is doing some really innovative work with ESXi at the edge and application deployment using a desired state engine.

Recently I had met with the team to discuss some of the options for their automated deployment which uses the tried and true ESXi scripted installation aka ESXi Kickstart. One thing that I had shared was just how powerful the %pre section within the kickstart is and can be used to redefine or update the original kickstart based on your installation criteria. For example, you could pull down external configuration files and determine at runtime to decide how you want to configure your networking to even fully bootstrapping a local vSAN datastore and this would all happen prior to ESXi installer starting. I have used the %pre section numerous times as a customer and also demonstrated in my USB-to-SDDC project which has also been an inspiration for the Project Keswick team.

One very cool capability that Project Keswick is enabling is the integration of the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi and one challenge they had faced with automating an ESXi installation when only a USB network adapter was available is additional configuration that must be setup before the installer can begin. They shared their solution and thought this would be a good blog post topic, especially as I know many folks use the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi in their homelab and if you wish to automate the installation, the solution shared from the team could help.

[Read more...]