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Updated Nested ESXi Appliances for 7.0 Update 1d & 2a

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I have just updated my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance collection to include support for the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1d and 7.0 Update 2a releases. This took a bit longer than usual due to a busy schedule but also due to some fixes and enhancements that I had been working on. For those interested, you can find the detailed change log below and these updates are only applicable for these two OVAs or newer going forward.

Downloads:

Changes

  • Fixed self-sign TLS certificate generation (Subject Alternative Name now matches the provided FQDN)
  • Updated NTP settings to use ESXCLI for configuration (previously updating ntp.conf)
  • Suppressed Core Dump warning (/UserVars/SuppressCoredumpWarning)
  • Updated ESXi installation VMDK from 4 to 12GB to support ESX-OS Data & VMFS Volume
  • Automatically configure ESX-OS Data & 4GB VMFS volume
  • Disabled Follow Hardware MAC by default (/Net/FollowHardwareMac)
  • Follow Hardware MAC can now be configured using OVF property guestinfo.followmac
  • Automatically recreate vmk0 interface to ensure unique MAC Address from vmnic0
  • Automatically configure vMotion traffic on vmk0

For previous Nested ESXi Appliance OVAs and/or the Nested ESXi Content Library, please take a look at http://vmwa.re/nestedesxi

Exploring the new vSphere with Tanzu VM Service with Nested ESXi

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After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, I was looking forward to kicking the tires on the highly anticipated vSphere with Tanzu Virtual Machine Service capability. Both Oren Penso and Myles Gray have both done a fantastic job on their respective blogs here and here demo'ing the new VM Service.

While browsing through Oren's Github repo since I came across his blog post first, a couple of things quickly caught my attention. The first was a reference to OvfEnv transport with the YAML manifests and the second was that he was able to deploy an Ubuntu VM, which is interesting since only CentOS is currently officially supported. Why was this interesting? Well, with these two pieces of information, I had a pretty good theory on how the guest customizations were being passed into the GuestOS for configuration and this gave me an idea ?

I decided to put my hypothesis to the test and try out the VM Service and deploy one of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and as you can see from the tweet below, it worked! ?

Disclaimer: vSphere with Tanzu and the VM Service currently only officially supports CentOS images for deployment, other operating systems are currently not supported. This is primarily for educational and experimentation purposes only. As of vSphere 8.x, you can now bring your own OVA/OVA for use with vSphere with Tanzu

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Stage Only & Stage and Install buttons disabled when updating to vSphere 7.0 Update 2a 

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vSphere 7.0 Update 2a was just released yesterday and it introduces the highly anticipated vSphere Virtual Machine Service which is part of the vSphere with Tanzu solution. Customers will now be able to get the exact same Kubernetes-native provisioning and management experience for deploying Virtual Machine based workloads along side their Kubernetes-based applications.

I was definitely interested in checking out this new feature and quickly navigated to my VCSA to start the upgrade and to my surprise, I noticed that both the Stage Only and Stage and Install buttons were disabled (grayed out) and preventing me from updating to the latest release!


I had filed an issue internally and after some troubleshooting, it looks like this may have been remnants caused by the previous Exception occurred in install precheck phase issue, which I had ran into during the update to 7.0 Update 2. Although I was initially pointed by Engineering to VMware KB 83145, it did not resolve the issue and I ran into a couple more errors like "Previous patching unsuccessful" and "Downloading RPM ...." messages within the VAMI UI as shown in the screenshots below

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