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Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2019 US Sessions

08.30.2019 by William Lam // 11 Comments

VMworld US 2019 just wrapped up yesterday and it looks like the VMworld team has already processed and published a number of recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2019.

As of writing this, there are a total of 554 sessions with 496 published with recordings. I will check back next week when more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Huge thanks to the VMworld team for getting this content out so quickly, be sure to give them a huge thanks if you are on Twitter. For those in the US, enjoy your three day weekend, I know I need a break away from the computer!

UPDATE 1 (09/03/19) - Added both Showcase Key Note and VMware {Code} sessions as well as initial Top 20 session stats by views.

UPDATE 2(09/07/19) - PDF decks are now available and links are published

Here is wget example:

wget --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2019/HBI1967BU.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2019/HBI1967BU.mp4 -O HBI1967BU.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "http://www.vmware.com"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2019/HBI1967BU.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile HBI1967BU.mp4

In addition, I have also published us.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.

Categories // Explore Tags // vmworld

Apple Mac Mini on VMware HCL!

08.01.2019 by William Lam // 15 Comments

For the past 6 years, the Apple Mac Mini has been one of the most popular hardware platforms for Virtualizing MacOS running on VMware vSphere enabling our customers to develop and build iOS and MacOS applications. With that said, VMware has historically only supported two Apple hardware platforms: Xserve (now EOL'd) and the Mac Pro (6,1) which is officially listed on VMware's Hardware Compatibility list and this has been officially supported by VMware since 2012 when we first introduced support for MacOS Virtualization with the vSphere 5.0 release.

As many of you know, I have been a huge advocate of this platform for a number of years now and I have been working with various Engineers over the years to ensure that we have the exact same user experience when working with ESXi on the Mac Mini as you do with the Mac Pro. I still recall in the early days where it took several "hacks" to get ESXi to successfully boot and install.

Today, ESXi installs on the Mac Mini just like any other x86 platform. It runs amazing well for our customers, especially for a consumer device, who have deployed them in their datacenters ranging from a couple hundred to several thousands for some of our larger Enterprise customers, one such example is MacStadium, the largest Apple Infrastructure-as-a-service provider which many of the Fortune 100/500 companies are leveraging to provide them with a platform to build and develop for the Apple eco-system.

UPDATE (08/27/20) - Apple 2018 Mac Mini 8,1 has been added to VMware HCL which supports both ESXi 6.7 Update 3 (Patch 03) & ESXi 7.0b

[Read more...]

Categories // Apple, ESXi Tags // apple, ESXi, ESXi 6.7 Update 2, mac mini, vSphere 6.7 Update 2

How to prevent physical CD-ROM from ejecting after installing or upgrading ESXi?

07.15.2019 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

While catching up on some news over the weekend, I had noticed a VMware Reddit thread asking a pretty interesting question on how to prevent the physical CD-ROM tray from ejecting after installing or upgrading ESXi? This behavior occurs whether you are using a physical CD-ROM media or a "Virtual" ISO image via an out-of-band interface like an iDRAC or iLO. If you are automating the installation or upgrade using Auto Deploy or network installation such as Kickstart, this is not a problem.

However, I was a bit surprised to hear that this was still a pain point in 2019, as many of the new servers in market do not even include an option for CD-ROM. Some of the suggestions really brought me back to the early 2000's including physically taping up the CD-DROM tray, which I have definitely seen customers doing but this is not a scalable solution and it requires a visit to the datacenter. 

One easy solution that I had suggested was to take advantage of ESXi's scripted installation capability also known as Kickstart and use the supported ESXi --noeject option after reboot. Since the install/upgrade was being done manually, the added benefit of this solution is that you can now have it automated 🙂 The other nice thing about this option is that you can specify the kickstart using the default ESXi ISO or you can take it a step further and embed the Kickstart with a custom ESXi ISO.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi Tags // cdrom, ESXi, kickstart, ks.cfg, noeject

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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