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How to bootstrap vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) on unsupported hardware?

01.19.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I was recently chatting with a fellow colleague who asked an interesting question about the memory overhead between running vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) versus the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) from a VMware Homelab perspective. I honestly did not know the answer as I am only using vSAN OSA for my personal homelab. I was curious myself, especially its implicationn on small form factor (SFF) systems which typically max at out 64GB of memory.

Today, vSAN ESA is only officially supported when using vSAN ESA Ready Nodes which are all listed in the vSAN ESA HCL and the minimum amount of memory is 512GB. For the best possible experience and supported configurations, customers should only use approved vSAN ESA hardware and the use of any other systems will not yield the same benefits nor outcomes. As an aside, a fantastic resource for all things vSAN ESA can be found on the vSAN ESA TechZone page, which I highly recommend bookmarking as there is a lot of in-depth technical resources and collateral.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and is purely for educational purposes, use at your own risk.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, Not Supported, VSAN, vSphere 8.0 Tags // ESXi 8.0, Express Storage Architecture, VSAN 8, vSphere 8.0

Automating Virtual Machine screenshots in vSphere

01.18.2023 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I was recently reminded of an old article that I wrote back in 2013 demonstrating how to capture Virtual Machine screenshots using a couple of options that are available within vSphere. While the blog post is more than 10 years old, the guidance and options are still applicable for all recent vSphere releases.

I highly recommend folks give the original article a read, especially for the full background but I did want to provide some updated information for those interested in automating the capture of VM screenshots using both the vSphere API as well as the HTTP Handler methods.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // screenshot, vSphere

Nested ESXi installation using HTTPS boot over VirtualEFI in vSphere 8

01.13.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

In vSphere 7.0 Update 2, an enhancement was made to the Virtual Machine's UEFI firmware called VirtualEFI that would enable ESXi to run in a VM (Nested ESXi) and perform an HTTP Boot given the ESXi bootloader URL without requiring any traditional PXE infrastructure.

This was especially useful for anyone testing or developing ESXi automation for use with ESXi Kickstart, where you can quickly prototype your automation without additional infrastructure dependencies and once the automation has been vetted, you can then leverage that exact same automation in your physical ESXi provisioning infrastructure.

The original solution had only supported HTTP and I recently came to learn that we can now also support HTTPS in vSphere 8!

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, Nested Virtualization, vSphere 8.0 Tags // efi, ESXi 8.0, Nested ESXi, UEFI, vSphere 8.0

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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Recent

  • vSphere with Tanzu using Intel Arc GPU 01/26/2023
  • Quick Tip - Automating allowed and not allowed Datastores for use with vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) 01/25/2023
  • ESXi with Intel Arc 750 / 770 GPU 01/24/2023
  • How to bootstrap vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) on unsupported hardware? 01/19/2023
  • Automating Virtual Machine screenshots in vSphere 01/18/2023

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