WilliamLam.com

vCenter Converter 6.4 Beta is now LIVE

by // Leave a Comment

To add to the exciting release week for VMware, I am happy to share that the vCenter Converter team has just released a public beta for their next upcoming 6.4 release!

If you are an existing vCenter Converter beta participant, you can head over to the vCenter Converter Beta Community https://communities.vmware.com/t5/vCenter-Converter/ct-p/5385 to download the latest release. If you wish to join the Beta program, simply register for free at https://www.vmware.com/learn/1645300_REG.html

UPDATE (05/11/23) - vCenter Converter 6.4 has officially GA'ed and can now be downloaded from HERE.

There are lots of exciting new updates with vCenter Converter 6.4 such as support for vSphere 8 and another highly requested feature is ability to convert from an Amazon EC2 instance to a vSphere-based VM! For more details, please refer to release notes which can be found HERE.

  • Added support for NVMe disk controllers
  • Added support for paravirtual SCSI disk controllers
  • Added support for virtual machine compatibility up to hardware version 20
  • Added support for VMware vCenter version 8.0 and VMware ESXi version 8.0
  • Аdded support for VMware Workstation version 17 and VMware Fusion version 13
  • Added conversion support for Amazon EC2 instances (from AWS EC2 to VMware vSphere or VMware Cloud on AWS)
  • Added conversion support for UEFI secure boot
  • Added conversion support for Microsoft VBS
  • Improved the overall security of vCenter Converter

How to enable passthrough for USB Network Adapters claimed by ESXi CDCE Driver?

by // 8 Comments

As part of vSphere 7.0, ESXi now ships with a USB CDCE (Communication Device Class Ethernet) driver which can benefit customers with SB network adapters that support the CDCE specification as shared in this blog post HERE. This can especially be useful for those running a VMware Homelab where the onboard network adapter may not be supported and using a CDCE USB network adapter would allow you to install ESXi.

When a CDCE-supported USB network adapter is connected to an ESXi host, it will automatically be claimed by the CDCE driver as shown in the screenshot below.


If you are planning to use the USB network adapter for VMkernel traffic, then there is no workflow change like any other physical network adapter. However, if you intend to passthrough the USB network adapter to a VM, then you may find that it is not working as expected.


The reason for this is that ESXi has already claimed the USB device, assuming you wish to use it for VMkernel traffic. To change the behavior for a particular CDCE-supported USB network adapter, we just need to apply a USB Quirk which tells ESXi to ignore this adapter.

[Read more...]

ESXi configstorecli enhancement in vSphere 8.0 Update 1

by // Leave a Comment

The ESXi configstorecli was introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and provides access to the ESXi ConfigStore which responsible for centrally managing all configurations for an ESXi host instead of relying on different methods including a variety of configuration files, I highly recommend reviewing this refresher article HERE if you have not heard of the configstorecli before. The ESXi ConfigStore is also the underlying infrastructure that powers the new vSphere Configuration Profile feature which is also part of the vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) solution.

For those who currently or plan to automate ESXi installations using Kickstart, I wrote an article HERE last year on how to start converting some of your existing automation into using the new ESXi configstorecli, which is another article I recommend folks take a look if you have no already.

One of the challenges that I personally found when using configstorecli was purely figuring out the overall schema for the different components, groups and keys that are available. While I have demonstrated how to traverse the configstore in this blog post HERE, I still found experience less than ideal. I would have liked a bit more of an iterative exploration of the configstore itself and rather than showing the entire schema, I could slowly expect each node as configstore is a stored as a JSON document.

[Read more...]