WilliamLam.com

Updated Character Limits for vSphere Objects

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I recently saw a question asking about the character limit for the various vSphere Inventory Objects like a Datacenter or Virtual Machine as an example. I was not aware of anything formally documented, but I did come across this 2018 blog post by fellow colleague Todd Simmons, who did some testing with vSphere 6.7 and shared his initial results.


I was curious myself on whether these limits have changed but I also noticed there were many other vSphere Objects that were not tested. I figured this would be an interesting exercise to re-evaluate against the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release and using some PowerShell code like the following to help:

$str = "w" * 80

Below are my findings which have been verified using the vSphere UI and I have also expanded the object list to cover more recent solutions such as vSphere with Tanzu.

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Automated Lab Deployment Script for vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

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After spending a few days playing with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) APIs, I am happy to share my latest automation lab deployment script for deploying vSphere with Tanzu using the new NSX ALB which was introduced with the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release.

Lab Deployment Automation

You can find the new automation script along with all the details at the following Github Repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-nsx-advanced-lb-automated-lab-deployment#enable-workload-management


In my environment, it took about ~32 minutes for the deployment to finish, but YMMV based on the performance of your underlying hardware.

Workload Management Automation

In addition to the automated lab deployment script above, I have also updated my community VMware.WorkloadManagement module to add support for enabling Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster using NSX ALB. This is introduced as a new function creatively called New-WorkloadManagement3. You use the Get-Help cmdlet to get a list of supported arguments or you can take a look at this example.

Simplified Nested ESXi installation in ESXi 7.0 Update 2 using HTTP Boot over VirtualEFI

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Deploying an ESXi scripted installation aka Kickstart running within a VM (Nested ESXi) has a number of benefits, especially for testing and development purposes. This was something I did regularly as a customer, especially with new releases of ESXi to ensure our existing automation scripts and processes continued to work before rolling out into production. ESXi kickstart itself is pretty straight forward, but the required supporting infrastructure (PXE Server, DHCP, TFTP, etc) that needs to be configured, especially for a greenfield deployment can often be challenging for new comers.

Even with an existing PXE infrastructure, it can often be difficult to configure or troubleshoot depending on your level of access which does not add any value in actually testing or automating the ESXi scripted installation process. In ESXi 7.0 Update 2, an enhancement was made to the Virtual Machine's UEFI firmware called VirtualEFI that would enable ESXi to perform an HTTP Boot given the ESXi bootloader URL and without requiring any of the traditional PXE infrastructure.

To take advantage of this new capability, you just need to have a physical server running ESXi 7.0 Update 2 and a VM that is configured with the latest vHW19 compatibility. To configure HTTP boot, you will need to add the following two VM Advanced Settings:

  • networkBootProtocol - httpv4 or httpv6
  • networkBootUri - HTTP URL to the ESXi bootloader (bootx64.efi)

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware

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