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ATTO's ESXi Thunderbolt Driver is now officially on VMware HCL

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Last week I had received some great news from our friends over at ATTO Technology that their ESXi Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel Driver has passed the VMware Certification process and is now officially listed on VMware's HCL. I had known the team was planning to certify their driver but was not aware of their timelines and whether it would actually get accepted given the fact that this was for a Thunderbolt-based device, which is the first of its kind for the VMware HCL.

Funny enough, it was roughly around this time last year that ATTO released a Beta of their ESXi Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel Driver which I had shared with my readers here. I was not surprised by the demand given the fact that no official solutions exists for customers who would like to take advantage of their existing SAN-based storage infrastructure when virtualizing Apple macOS (iOS development, etc) on vSphere. ATTO has certified two of their ThunderLink devices, customers have the option of using either the TLFC2082 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 8Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device or the TLFC2182 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 16Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device which is supported from ESXi 5.5u3 all the way up to latest 6.5u1 release.


Click here for the direct link to VMware HCL.

Huge congrats to the ATTO team for getting this on the VMware HCL and partnering up with VMware to provide a solution for our customers who virtualize Apple macOS using vSphere!

Lastly, if you are going to be at VMworld and you are interested in learning more about this solution, be sure to drop by the ATTO booth.

Thank you for voting! (Top vBlog 2017)

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I had been in meetings all day today and I had noticed my Twitter notifications was going nuts. It was only until my last meeting of the day, which was with Emad, did I learn what was going on. I had no idea the Top vBlog 2017 results were being announced today and when Emad broke the news that I had gotten #1 this year, I was left speechless. I want to thank everyone who voted for me, this recognition truly means a lot coming from the community, so thank you! I also want to congratulate all my fellow bloggers who were also recognized in this years Top vBlog including the special category winners.


Lastly, a huge shoutout to Eric Siebert for running the Top vBlog program and spending countless hours putting everything together, we know its not easy each year and the community really appreciates it. Of course, I could not leave out Eric Wright and Turbonomic who were the sponsors again for this years Top vBlog. Thanks for guys!

If you missed the live-stream earlier (like me), you can watch the full results below. I believe Eric will also be publishing the complete Top vBlog results on his blog soon, so stay tuned for that!

vSphere Client Login UI customizations do not persist in VCSA 6.5 Update 1

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The much anticipated release of vSphere 6.5 Update 1 just GA'ed late last week and like many in the community, I also went ahead and upgraded my home lab to this latest release. vSphere 6.5 Update 1 contains a ton of fixes as well as several new capabilities which you can read all about in the release notes here and here.

One neat little trick I take advantage of in my lab environments when deploying the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is actually pre-filling out the credentials for the vSphere Client UI (not recommended for production environments of course) which I had blogged about here a few years back. Sine I have many different environments for different scenarios, I find myself being lazy and having to type in the credentials to each one of these environments. Instead, I can pre-fill either the username and/or password (which I will stress again, not recommended for production) within the vSphere Client Login UI page which is simply just using HTML.


After making the necessary changes to my VCSA 6.5u1 system, I needed to reboot my ESXi host and when everything came back up, I was surprised to find my changes to the vSphere Client Login UI had disappeared. It took me awhile to figure out why the changes were not persisting across reboots. There seems to be a change in behavior compared to prior releases of the VCSA (6.0 & 6.5) on when this capability was actually possible.

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