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Aquantia 10GbE ESXi Driver for Apple 2018 Mac Mini

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I know many of you have been anxiously waiting for ESXi to be fully functional on the latest Apple Mac Mini (2018), unfortunately I do not have any news to share with you on that front. Without help from Apple, we are still challenged with Apple's new T2 chip, which prevents us from accessing the underlying NVMe device.

UPDATE (04/27/20) - Marvell (formally Aquantia) has just released an official Native ESXi Driver for their AQtion based network adaptors which you can find here and for the complete list of supported devices using this driver, please refer to the VMware HCL here.

Having said that, I do have some exciting news regarding the built-in 10Gigabit Ethernet adaptor on the 2018 Mac Mini. The 10GbE adaptor uses an Aquantia chipset, this is also the same chipset used in Apple's high end iMac Pro which was released earlier in the year. Over the past few weeks, I have been working with the Aquantia team and they have successfully ported over their open source Atlantic driver to a VMKlinux driver for ESXi, which they have published here. Although the local NVMe device can not be used to run any VMs, with the network fully enabled, customers could take advantage of this model and connect to IP-based storage to start leveraging the new Mac Mini platform.

The easiest way to incorporate the driver into the latest ESXi release is to use Image Builder within the vSphere H5 Client UI, below are the step-by-step instructions.

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Enhanced vCenter Server Audit Event & Logging in vSphere 6.7 Update 2

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A couple of years back I had published a detailed analysis on vCenter Server's Authentication (AuthN) and Authorization (AuthZ) from an auditing and logging standpoint. This has been the go to reference for many of our customers and the posts also includes a number of log samples which I have documented in the following Github repository.

In addition to serving as a reference for our customers, it has also helped our Product and Engineering teams understand where we still had some gaps and how we could improve the overall user experience. As hinted in the recently announced vSphere 6.7 Update 2 release, which will be available soon, there are number of new auditing enhancements that have been made to both vCenter Server and the vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) service that I think customers will really appreciate.

"Real" client IP address in Events

When you look at a login or logout Event in vCenter Server today, you may have noticed the user's client IP Address is actually of the vCenter Server rather than the actual remote client's address and the reason for this is explained here. In vSphere 6.7 Update 2, the real client IP Address is now captured and is included in all successful login/logout and failed logins. This information can now enable administrators to easily identify unauthorized access and be able to quickly track down the systems initiating the connections.

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How to immediately refresh the network GuestInfo using VMware Tools?

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We all know the benefits of installing VMware Tools into your guest operating system which also includes additional functionality such as the Guest Operations APIs, allowing administrators to perform operations directly within the guest (credentials required), even if networking is not available. In addition to all these benefits, customers also get better visibility into the guest such as the underlying OS that is actually installed, disk volumes and networking information such as hostname and IP Addresses for the different network interfaces.

I am assuming most of you have seen the VM Summary page in the vSphere UI and if VMware Tools is installed and running, some of the GuestInfo data will be displayed such as networking.


An interesting tidbit that I had learned recently about VMware Tools while working on Instant Cloning Apple MacOS (yup, this works!) is that there is a default polling interval of 30 seconds in which this GuestInfo data is updated. In general, this is not a problem as this type of information does not change frequently and the default should be more than sufficient for most customers.

However, if you are performing an Instant Clone and you are relying on the vSphere API and the GuestInfo data to determine the IP Address of the guest, having to wait up to 30seconds is not ideal, especially since the actual Instant Clone operation completes in just a few seconds. One option is to change the default polling interval, which I have outlined the details in the MacOS Instant Clone article, but rather than changing the default which can add some additional load, there is actually a much simpler solution.

With VMware Tools 10.1 or newer, customers now have a way to immediate initiate a refresh of the networking info, directly from within the guest. This is perfect for the Instant Clone use case where network configuration is applied through a customization script and you can then run the update command afterwards to ensure the GuestInfo data is immediately reflected. Below are the respective commands for each OS type and you will need to have administrator privileges to perform this operation.

Windows:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMwareToolboxCmd.exe info update network

Linux:

/usr/bin/vmware-toolbox-cmd info update network

MacOS:

/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Tools/vmware-tools-cli info update network