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Quick Tip - How to deploy vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) to legacy CPU without VMX Unrestricted Guest feature?

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I recently had a customer reach out who was having an issue deploying the latest vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 8.x to an ESXi host that had a CPU that was no longer supported. After the VCSA OVA was uploaded by the VCSA (UI/CLI) installer, it fails to power on the VM with the following error message:

The Intel "VMX Unrestricted Guest" feature is necessary to run this virtual machine on an Intel processor

This problem is only observed with older legacy CPUs that do not support some of the modern CPU instructions that is expected by most workloads today. There is workaround for those that still wish to run on unsupported hardware, which may yield other unexpected behaviors, by adding a VM Advanced Setting monitor.allowLegacyCPU = TRUE

However, there is a chicken/egg problem that user was not able to add this setting before the VM was automatically powered on by the VCSA Installer.

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How to automate adding a license into vCenter Server with custom label? 

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When adding a license key into vCenter Server using the vSphere UI, users have the ability to provide a custom label that is then associated with that specific license key.


This is certainly more useful than the system default label which uses "License N", where N is an incrementing number.

While the majority of license management can be fully automated using the vCenter Server LicenseManager API, adding a license key with a custom label is unfourntately an operation that is currently not possible with the public API.

With that said, there is a way in which you can still automate this operation 🙂

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Automated ESXi Installation with a USB Network Adapter using Kickstart

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I have been working with the Project Keswick team for quite some time now, which is an OCTO project is lead by my good friend Alan Renouf, who is doing some really innovative work with ESXi at the edge and application deployment using a desired state engine.

Recently I had met with the team to discuss some of the options for their automated deployment which uses the tried and true ESXi scripted installation aka ESXi Kickstart. One thing that I had shared was just how powerful the %pre section within the kickstart is and can be used to redefine or update the original kickstart based on your installation criteria. For example, you could pull down external configuration files and determine at runtime to decide how you want to configure your networking to even fully bootstrapping a local vSAN datastore and this would all happen prior to ESXi installer starting. I have used the %pre section numerous times as a customer and also demonstrated in my USB-to-SDDC project which has also been an inspiration for the Project Keswick team.

One very cool capability that Project Keswick is enabling is the integration of the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi and one challenge they had faced with automating an ESXi installation when only a USB network adapter was available is additional configuration that must be setup before the installer can begin. They shared their solution and thought this would be a good blog post topic, especially as I know many folks use the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi in their homelab and if you wish to automate the installation, the solution shared from the team could help.

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