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Quick Tip - Avoid network conflicts with Docker Bridge Network on the vCenter Cloud Gateway for vSphere+/vSAN+

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The new vSphere+/vSAN+ cloud service is now generally available for all customers! For those interested, I recently wrote about my first experience using the new vSphere+vSAN+ service with my vSphere Homelab environment, which I will also be updating based on the generally available service.

In addition to the resources above and in the VMC Cloud Console, here is a link to the official vSphere+/vSAN+ documentation including pre-req.

During my initial deployment of the vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) used by the vSphere+/vSAN+ service, I did not run into any issues but upon deploying my second VCGW for a different environment, I ran into some networking issues. After a bit of debugging, I came to learn  that the VCGW application and services are composed of various Docker containers and there was a network conflict with the default Docker Bridge Network that the VCGW has been configured by default with.

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Emulating a Virtual USB storage device using Nested ESXi

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My buddy Alan Renouf had pinged me earlier today and asked whether it was possible to emulate a USB storage device that could aide him in the testing the installation of ESXi from a USB device but without having to use a real USB device. I honestly was not aware of any mechanisms that would allow for this and I normally would just passthrough a real USB device to a Nested ESXi VM for this type of testing purposes.

While thinking about his question, I also recall we had made some enhancements to our Virtual USB interface that would allow user to back it using a disk file. While searching further, I came to learn that not only was this possible, but it was also a common method for testing USB-based installation without the hassle of messing with physical hardware. It turns out you can just present a Virtual Disk (VMDK) to a VM running ESXi (Nested ESXi) and through a special driver, it will recognize the device as a USB storage device!

I definitely wish I had learned about this earlier and it goes to show, all the hard engineering efforts made by our VMware Engineers to make testing and using our software as easy as possible even without needing real physical hardware 😀

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How to host your own simple ESXi update depot?

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I recently upgraded my single ESXi host, which is used for my personal vSphere Homelab, to the latest patch release of ESXi 7.0 Update 3e using ESXCLI and connecting directly to VMware's online depot.

This is the same method that I have been using since 2012 when I first wrote about this in a blog post using a pretty cool method of upgrading/patching a single ESXi hosts. If you are fortunate to have multiple ESXi hosts and a vCenter Server, you definitely should be using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) provided by vCenter Server rather than the ESXCLI method, especially as there are no upgrade pre-checks built into in compared to vLCM.

Although my environment has a vCenter Server, I can not use vLCM because I only have a single ESXi host and ESXCLI method is really the only viable option. Customers may have a simliar setup, whether that is for a homelab, smaller environment or simply do not have a vCenter Server. Using the ESXCLI workflow, it certainly is the easiest if your ESXi host can reach VMware's online repo which is hosted at hostupdate.vmware.com, however this may not be possible for everyone, especially for remote locations where connectivity may be spotty or simply is not allowed to have outbound connectivity.

For such environments, you might be interested in hosting your own ESXi update repo and as always, I was curious on how one could setup something simliar without much effort and well, here we are with this blog post 😀

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