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NSX-T Opaque Networks now supported with Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling

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The Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling continues to be an extremely powerful tool for our customers and I just love hearing successful customer stories like the one recently shared by Jason on how the tool allowed him to easily migrate over 600 Virtual Machines and with more to come!

One capability that customers have been asking for is the ability to migrate to and from an NSX-T Opaque Network type, which the current Fling does not support. This has become more and more important as the default NSX stack for VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) is now NSX-T by default, rather than NSX-V. We are also seeing requests from on-premises customers who have deployed NSX-T for their next generation infrastructure and needing the ability to easily migrate workloads between their old infrastructure that maybe running VSS/VDS or NSX-V backed networks.

With the help from two new colleagues, Vikas Shitole and Rajmani Patel, we are excited to announce the release Cross vCenter Workload Migration v2.6 which now adds support for NSX-T Opaque Networks!

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vSphere 6.7 Update 2 add support back for Apple Mac Pro 6,1

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Last fall, support for vSphere 6.7 Update 1 on the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 was removed by VMware after finding out an updated version of the Apple Firmware prevented ESXi from booting up properly after upgrading. After some investigation and troubleshooting with several customers, VMware Engineering found a solution to workaround the problem and that fix is included in the latest vSphere 6.7 Update 2 release. As mentioned in the original blog post, this could also impact Apple Mac Mini's, which are not officially supported by VMware, but the fix should also apply to the Mac Mini.

In addition, the VMware HCL will also be updated shortly to reflect support for both vSphere 6.7 Update 2 along with the existing vSphere 6.7 support. For customers that have been waiting for features in vSphere 6.7 Update 1, you can finally upgrade to the latest release to get all the new features and benefits of vSphere.

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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