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USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling now supports vSphere 8!

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I know many of you have been holding off on your vSphere 8 upgrade, patiently waiting for a compatible version of the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling. Today, the wait is finally over and you can now head over to the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling page to download latest v1.11 version, which is now compatible with vSphere 8! 😀

For those looking to create a custom ESXi images that also incorporates the Fling, you will need to download the latest PowerCLI 13.0 release (due to changes in vSphere 8 for custom ESXi image creation) and also consider using vSphere Lifecycle Manager whether that is through the vLCM UI or using the new vLCM PowerCLI cmdlets or you can use the old vSphere Image Builder interface.

For those in the US that celebrate and/or observe the holiday, enjoy the long weekend!

Creating custom ESXi images using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) UI and PowerCLI cmdlets for vSphere 8

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I have started to use vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) more and more, especially after upgrading to vSphere 8 as it will be the primary lifecycle management solution going forward for both vSphere image and configuration management.

The other reason for using vLCM is that vSphere Update Manager (VUM) baselines have also been deprecated in vSphere 8 and while you can still use it for now, it should not come as a surprise that VUM and its functionality will be removed in the future and all of its workflows including the use of vSphere Image Builder should also be transitioned over to using vLCM.

One of the most common and basic workflow for customers today is creating custom ESXi images (ISO or Offline Bundle) that includes additional ESXi drivers. Since vLCM is probably new to most folks (including myself), I wanted to share how you can create your own custom ESXi images using both the vLCM UI (which can be a bit non-intuitive) as well as the new PowerCLI cmdlets that was jus released today as part of PowerCLI 13.0 release that adds support for both vLCM and vSphere 8!

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vSphere UI Client Plugin named N/A after vSphere 8 upgrade

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This past weekend I finally got a chance to upgrade my personal homelab to vSphere 8, which went super smooth! As shared on Twitter and Mastadon, I started with my VCSA which was running vSphere 7.0 Update 3h and once that had completed and running for a couple of days, I then upgraded my single ESXi host which was running 7.0 Update 3g which runs on Supermicro E200-8D.

After was functional after the upgrade, including the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) UI Plugin 😀

This morning, I happened to navigate over to the vSphere UI Client Plugin screen under Administration->Solutions->Client Plugins and I noticed I had one plugin named "N/A" and was was showing incompatible.


I was not sure what the plugin was and raised this internally with the vSphere UI team on whether this was expected and if there was something I needed to do. It turns out this was the default vCloud Availability plugin for vCloud Director that ships with a vCenter Server deployment and it uses the deprecated local plugin architecture and this particular version of plugin is no longer applicable or compatible with vSphere 8.

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