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Disable passthrough for specific USB devices for use with ESXi

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There was another interesting question that I saw recently asking whether you can use a USB device for an ESXi Datastore while still maintaining the ability to passthrough other USB devices to a VM? This was interesting because my understanding was that you had to choose between one of the two options because ESXi required the USB Arbitrator service to be disabled for USB storage (not officially supported by VMware) and thus disabling USB passthrough for all of your VMs.

I decided to reach out to our USB expert within VMware Engineering, Songtao, who you may know as developer for the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi and the Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling for this thoughts on this question. It turns out my assumption has actually been incorrect and there is actually a way to easily exclude specific USB devices from VM passthrough which can then be used by ESXi.

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Automated Lab Deployment Script for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2

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One of my pet projects that I have been looking into is to easily deploy the required infrastructure, using Nested ESXi of course, to be able to quickly standup a "basic" VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment. There are a couple of solutions that currently exists in the community that can help take a user from having no infrastructure to setting up all the components required to standup a complete functional VCF envionmrent, similar to that of a physical VCF deployment. As such, the pre-requisites for using those tools was a bit more than what I was looking for and can also feel overwhelming for a new user. I certainly fell into that category while looking at some of the existing tools.

Ultimately, my use case was slightly different and I also did not need all the bells and whistles such as configuring Application Virtual Networks (VCN) and this also meant that I could dramatically simplify the deployment. For example, instead of deploying the ESXi hosts from scratch, I could simply take advantage of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and use that as a starting point. For those familiar with my various PowerCLI automated lab deployment scripts, I have created a simliar experience for VCF that will deploy a set of Nested ESXi Appliances along with the VMware Cloud Builder appliance, which is then used to deploy VCF on top of the Nested ESXi VMs. To ensure the user experience is as painless and simple, I also use the customer supplied configurations within the script to automagically generate the VCF configuration JSON file that can then be uploaded directly to the Cloud Builder appliance to begin the VCF deployment once the initial infrastructure has been deployed by the automation script.

Note: Although AVN and the respective NSX-T configuration is not in scope for the automation script, it is definitely possible to use a solution like VyOS or pfSense and using techniques like the following to automate the additional infrastructure to enable the ability to deploy a complete VCF environment. I will leave this as as fun and interesting learning exercise for the reader.

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Using Packer vsphere-iso provider with VMware Cloud on AWS

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I am a huge fan of HashiCorp Packer, which makes automating Virtual Machine images for vSphere including OVF, OVA and vSphere Content Library Templates extremely easy. Packer supports two vSphere Providers, the first being vmware-iso which requires SSH access to an ESXi host and the second called vsphere-iso which does not require ESXi access but instead connects to vCenter Server using the vSphere API, which is the preferred method for vSphere Automation.

I started working with Packer and the vmware-iso several years ago and because there is not 100% parity between the two vSphere providers, I have not really looked at the vsphere-iso provider or even attempted to transition over. I was recently working on some automation within my VMware Cloud on AWS(VMConAWS) SDDC and since this is a VMware managed service, customers do not have access to the underlying ESXi hosts nor SSH access. I thought this would be a good time to explore the vsphere-iso provider and see if I can make it work in a couple of different networking scenarios.

For customers that normally establish either a Direct Connect (DX) or VPN (Policy or Route-based) from their on-premises environment to their SDDC, there is nothing special that needs to be setup to use Packer. However, if you are like me who may not always have these types of connectivity setup or if you wish to use Packer directly over the internet to your SDDC, then some additional configurations will be needed.

UPDATE (04/12/22) - A floppy option can now be used with Photon OS to host the kickstart file, see this Github issue for an example.

Packer Connectivity Scenarios

In both scenarios below, DX/VPN is not configure or relied upon to the VMConAWS SDDC.

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