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Exploring the new vSphere with Tanzu VM Service with Nested ESXi

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After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, I was looking forward to kicking the tires on the highly anticipated vSphere with Tanzu Virtual Machine Service capability. Both Oren Penso and Myles Gray have both done a fantastic job on their respective blogs here and here demo'ing the new VM Service.

While browsing through Oren's Github repo since I came across his blog post first, a couple of things quickly caught my attention. The first was a reference to OvfEnv transport with the YAML manifests and the second was that he was able to deploy an Ubuntu VM, which is interesting since only CentOS is currently officially supported. Why was this interesting? Well, with these two pieces of information, I had a pretty good theory on how the guest customizations were being passed into the GuestOS for configuration and this gave me an idea 🤔

I decided to put my hypothesis to the test and try out the VM Service and deploy one of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and as you can see from the tweet below, it worked! 🤯

Disclaimer: vSphere with Tanzu and the VM Service currently only officially supports CentOS images for deployment, other operating systems are currently not supported. This is primarily for educational and experimentation purposes only. As of vSphere 8.x, you can now bring your own OVA/OVA for use with vSphere with Tanzu

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Rocky Linux RC1 on ESXi-x86 & ESXi-Arm

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This morning, I saw that Rocky Linux RC1 was now available and includes support for both x86 and AARCH64 (Arm) and I wanted to give it a quick spin on both ESXi-x86 and ESXi-Arm.

ESXi-x86

I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-x86 using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. You will however need to disable Secure Boot (VM Options->Boot Options) as it is currently not supported.


If you do not, you will see the following error message when booting up the ISO: Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation


The default network adapter for this GOS in ESXi-x86 is using VMXNET3 and it was automatically detected. If you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.


VMware Tools can be installed by running the following commands:

yum -y install open-vm-tools
systemctl enable vmtoolsd
systemctl start vmtoolsd

ESXi-Arm

I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-Arm using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. Networking for ESXi-Arm is using e1000e and if you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.

Unlike Rocky Linux for x86, there is currently not a VMware Tools package that can be installed using yum and my attempts at compiling VMware Tools lead to missing packages that are currently not available in their repository. I have already filed an issue on the VMware Tools Github repo for tracking purposes.

Stage Only & Stage and Install buttons disabled when updating to vSphere 7.0 Update 2a 

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vSphere 7.0 Update 2a was just released yesterday and it introduces the highly anticipated vSphere Virtual Machine Service which is part of the vSphere with Tanzu solution. Customers will now be able to get the exact same Kubernetes-native provisioning and management experience for deploying Virtual Machine based workloads along side their Kubernetes-based applications.

I was definitely interested in checking out this new feature and quickly navigated to my VCSA to start the upgrade and to my surprise, I noticed that both the Stage Only and Stage and Install buttons were disabled (grayed out) and preventing me from updating to the latest release!


I had filed an issue internally and after some troubleshooting, it looks like this may have been remnants caused by the previous Exception occurred in install precheck phase issue, which I had ran into during the update to 7.0 Update 2. Although I was initially pointed by Engineering to VMware KB 83145, it did not resolve the issue and I ran into a couple more errors like "Previous patching unsuccessful" and "Downloading RPM ...." messages within the VAMI UI as shown in the screenshots below

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