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Heads Up - ESXi 8.0 Update 2 requires XSAVE CPU instruction even with allowLegacyCPU=true

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As shared back in 2022 in my Homelab Considerations for vSphere 8.x blog post, if you attempt to install ESXi on system where the CPU is no longer being supported by the OEM vendor, who then informs VMware on what to publish on the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide (VCG), you will see the following error message preventing you from proceeding.


Also mentioned in that article, you can override this default behavior with the following ESXi boot option: allowLegacyCPU=true which would convert this from an error to warning message but allowing you to proceed in an installation or upgrade.

Obviously, this is not officially supported by VMware and its behavior was never guarantee but it certainly was a nice gesture, in my humble opinion from Engineering, as they could have easily not allowed any override based on on our official VCG. For homelab use cases, it might be okay to use a CPU that is 5 to 6 years old, knowing that it should be replaced hopefully in the near future.

I just had a couple of users report issues while upgrading to the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 2 release when using the allowLegacyCPU boot option and saw the following error message

VMB: 716: Unsupported CPU


The ESXi installer immediately halts and prevents the upgrade from proceeding ...

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Exploring GenAI with a private ChatGPT solution using my own blog posts

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Generative AI (GenAI) has taken the world by storm and not just in tech but it has also infiltrated every single industry with billions of dollars (here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here) being invested to unlock its hidden potentials.

I am sure many of you have already experimented with some aspect of GenAI whether that is using chat interfaces like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google Bard to the impressive text-to-image generation tools like DALL-E from OpenAI, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion from Stability.AI to just name a few.

I use ChatGPT/Bard on a regular basis to help me debug cryptic Linux error message to helping me a craft complex regular expression to generating random PowerShell snippets for automating various tasks, the possibilities even for IT Administrators are pretty endless. My workflow typically includes the use of ChatHub, an all-in-one chatbot browser plugin that allows me to use both ChatGPT and Bard simultaneously to compare and/or identify the best possible answer.

Until recently, solutions like ChatGPT only have access to data trained up to Sept 2021 but even with this constraint, the biggest issue that plagues all of these AI models are their hallucinations. AI hallucinations is where an AI simply makes up responses believing that it is factual and while this problem is being worked on by the broader industry, it certainly makes it difficult to trust and validate an answer before using it yourself. I have certainly seen this first hand when asking ChatGPT to generate some code, I would say it is usually 60/40% correct but I often have to verify and re-prompt when I know the syntax or answer is completely wrong.

While using these platforms, I had been thinking about a personal use case of mines and I was curious if other bloggers or even some of my readers might be able relate?

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Quick Tip - Easily identify Virtual Appliances using vSphere API

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VMware Virtual Appliances (VA) that are built from either VMware or from our 3rd party eco-system will typically include useful metadata about the solution including name, version, vendor and other details.

Using the vSphere UI, you can locate this information when selecting a VM under Configure->Settings->vApp Options and below is an example for a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).


Note: If you deploy a VA directly to an ESXi host, these VA properties will not be available as the vApp capability is a vCenter Server feature.

I recently had an inquiry from a customer with over 10K+ VMs that was looking to identify this information and obviously, using the vSphere UI would be a non-starter and was looking for a way to automate this.

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