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Benefits of VM Templates (VMTX) in vSphere Content Library

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A commonly miss-understood capability of the vSphere Content Library is managing and distributing Virtual Machine Templates (VMTX), which was introduced in vSphere 6.7 Update 2.

When vSphere Content Library was first released in vSphere 5.0, content was distributed by using a pull-based replication where the subscriber vCenter Server would setup initiate the content subscription to the publisher vCenter Server and then content would then be downloaded to the subscriber vCenter Server as shown in the diagram below.


This initial architecture of vSphere Content Library made it extremely easy for any vCenter Server, regardless of their vCenter Single Sign-On domain, to create a subscription and download content (ISO, OVF/OVA and other files) from the vSphere Content Library of the publisher vCenter Server.

The creation of the vSphere Content Library subscription was managed completely by the individual subscribing vCenter Server as long as it knew the subscription URL and any credentials that may have been configured and of course connectivity to the publisher vCenter Server. While this made it easy for anyone to subscribe content from a vSphere Content Library, it also meant for larger organizations with many vCenter Server(s), an additional task was required to configure each subscribing vCenter Server.

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Google Coral USB Edge TPU Accelerator on ESXi

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Several weeks back, I came across a really strange post on the VMTN communities asking how to change the Device ID (DID) and Vendor ID (VID) for a USB Device that has been passthrough to a VM from ESXi? The device in question is the Google Coral USB Edge TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) Accelerator, which is a relatively in-expensive device that can help accelerate machine learning (ML) inferencing. With all the buzz these days with Generative AI and ChatGPT, I can only imagine its popularity has grown even further but I did not realize how popular this device has been in the community, especially for those wanting to use it with ESXi.

The initial observation reported by this user and also by many others in the Coral community was that ESXi was showing the incorrect VID/DID for the Coral USB device and because of this, it was not working correctly when passthrough'ed to a VM and they were looking for a way to change the DID/VID value from 1a6e:089a (Global Unichip Corp.) to 18d1:9302 (Google Inc.).

Interestingly enough, a couple of weeks ago, my buddy Alan Renouf had also shared that he recently purchased the Coral USB device, so I figured I would check with him first to see if he was observing the same behavior that was being reported, which he was. I had been going through the Github reports to try better understand the issue and some of the previous workarounds that users had done including disabling the vmkusb module, which I definitely not recommended, especially for more recent releases of ESXi where that will simply disable all USB functionality to your ESXi host.

I still could not wrap my head around the issue as the reports did not make any sense in terms of the DID/VID not being claimed correctly or that it needed to change to properly function. This also did not make sense when speaking with our USB expert (Songtao who also developed our USB Network Native Driver for ESXi), so I decided to bite the bullet and purchase the Coral USB device, which apparently is difficult to obtain unless you overpay on Amazon, which I did.

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USB Network Native Driver Fling for ESXi 8.0 Update 1

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Songtao and I are happy to share that we now have a compatible version of the USB Network Native Driver for ESX v1.12 Fling that supports the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release! ?

This release also includes a couple of minor enhancement and fixes which are listed below:

  • Support for new DLINK RTL8156 device (0x2001:0xb301)
  • Updated maximum supported USB Network devices from 8 to 12
  • Resolved 2.5GbE link speed issue for RTL8156 adapter

Additionally, while ESXi 8.0 Update 1 has just been released, we know that not everyone will be on the latest version and these enhancement and fixes have also been ported to a version of USB Network Native Driver for ESX v1.12 Fling driver to also support ESXi 8.0, 8.0a, 8.0b, etc.

Use the following ESXi Component ZIP files based on your desired version of ESXi 8.x:

  • ESXi 8.0 - ESXi800-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-64098182-component-21668107.zip
  • ESXi 8.0 Update 1 - ESXi80U1-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-64098092-component-21669994.zip

Note: There are no plans to backport these enhancements/fixes to prior ESXi releases

Finally, if you are looking to create a custom ESXi ISO or Image Profile AND you either have an existing or can deploy a vCenter Server, please refer to this blog post for using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) via the UI or PowerCLI to create your custom images.


If you do NOT have or can not deploy a vCenter Server (no hosts required), then you can refer to this blog post for using PowerCLI Image Builder to create your custom images, but make sure you update Python dependency to at least 3.7.9+ or you will run into this issue.