There are many options when it comes to moving or copying Virtual Machine(s) across two ESXi hosts that are fully licensed and can be managed by a vCenter Server, but what about standalone ESXi hosts that only use the Free ESXi Hypervisor license?
Luckily, we have a couple of native solutions from VMware that not only work, but they are completely free to use, which some folks may not even realize!
After successfully passing through the new Intel Arc 750/770 GPU to both a Linux and Windows VM running on ESXi, which also includes keyboard/mouse access and video output to an external monitor, I wanted to see if our vSphere with Tanzu solution could also take advantage of the new Intel Arc GPU?
The answer is absolutely YES! 😀
In vSphere 7.0 Update 3 MP01 and later, vSphere with Tanzu introduced the support for adding a Dynamic DirectPath I/O device to a VM that is provisioned using the VM Service Operator. Before we can take advantage of the new Dynamic DirectPath I/O feature, we first need to create a new custom VM Class definition that maps to our Intel Arc GPU.
One of the recent features of the vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) is the ability configure the vSphere Datastores that vCLS is allowed to use to provision the required service VMs, which can be on a vSphere Cluster under Configure->vSphere Cluster Services->Datastores as shown in the screenshot below.
In addition to the vSphere UI, you can also programmatically update this configuration using the vSphere API and with tools like PowerCLI as one of the interfaces to the API.