WilliamLam.com

On-Demand session URLs for VMware Explore US 2022

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VMware Explore US has just concluded earlier this week and the VMware Explore team has been hard at work in publishing recorded sessions (those that were allowed to be recorded) into the VMware Explore On-Demand Video Library, which only requires a free VMware Explore account to watch all the amazing content from VMware employees, to partners and our community of users.

Similiar to past years, I have put together a small Github page that simply summarize all VMware Explore US 2022 breakout sessions by their Category, Session Code, Session Name, on-demand URL link and Session Speakers. This should make it very easier to search for a specific session, topic or speaker and jump straight to the VMware Explore on-demand link, which will require a VMware Explore account to view the session. There are no offline viewing options, you must login to view the content from the VMware Explore site.

As of 12pm PST, 410 out of 458 sessions have been posted online. I will check back next week and update the repo if the additional sessions recordings will be published.


You can access the repo by visiting: https://github.com/lamw/vmware-explore-2022-session-urls (short URL: https://vmwa.re/vmware-explore-2022)

How to manually clean up a Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS) on an ESXi host?

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If an ESXi host was connected to a Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) and you were not able to properly remove it from the vCenter inventory, which cleans up the VDS as part of the removal, then you will be left with a stale VDS configuration.


Of course, the ideal workflow is to clean this up within vCenter Server but if you some how lost access or the vCenter Server was deleted and you might be wondering how to manually clean this up?

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vSphere ESXi 7.x will be last version to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization

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As a heads up, I just wanted to share that VMware has just published a new knowledge base article to communicate that ESXi 7.x will be the last major release to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization, which was originally introduced back in 2011 with the release of vSphere 5.0.

Last year, VMware had also published a blog outlining that they will no longer pursue hardware certification for the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1 for ESXi and as unfortunate as this is, hopefully this updated news will not come as a surprise to any of our customers or partners due to the various challenges in supporting the Apple hardware platform with ESXi.

On a more personal note, this is also a bitter sweet end, I have been writing about Apple macOS Virtualization on ESXi since its inception almost exactly 11 years ago. I came to learn about the new virtualization capability during an on-site beta for vSphere 5.0 (codenamed MN) at VMware HQ back when I was a customer. Not only did our organization have a need for this capability, but this was also the time that Apple had announced EOL'ed of Apple XServe, which was the initial hardware platform that was officially supported. I still recall emailing our leadership after the on-site to purchase as many XServe as we could before you could no longer buy the systems so that we can enable our development teams who were building both iOS and macOS applications.

It certainly has been a wild ride over the years in advocating for our users and their plethora of use cases to getting the Apple Mac Mini to run ESXi like any other x86 platform and even getting the Apple Mac Mini added to the VMware HCL. I still remember all the hoops and hacks that one needed to jump through just to boot ESXi and over the years, various VMware Engineers have incrementally helped get us to where we are at today, so a big thanks for all of their support over the years.