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Windows Server 2012 fix is out for the VCS to VCSA Migration Fling!

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Happy New Years everyone! Here is the first post of 2016 🙂

I know many of you have been anxiously waiting for a fix to the Winexe bug that causes the VCS to VCSA Migration Fling to fail when migrating from a vCenter Server that runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (includes R2) OS to the VCSA. It has taken a bit longer than we all had hoped due to legal reviews and such, but today I am please to announce that we now have an updated release to the VCS to VCSA Migration appliance (v0.9.1). For customers using Windows Server 2012, WinRM will be used instead of Winexe due to the Windows bug that has been identified and will require a couple of additional configurations on the source Windows vCenter Server prior to starting the migration process. For more details, please refer to the documentation on the Fling site. Customers using Windows Server 2008, Winexe will continue to work as it does today.

In addition to this fix, we also now support specifying a custom port for the Microsoft SQL Server Database in case you had changed it from the default of 1433, which a few customers have asked for.

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I would like to give a big thanks to both Mike and Ravi for working tirelessly on getting this fix out as soon as they could along with all the legal hurdles. Let us know if you have any feedback by either leaving a comment below or better yet, interact with the Engineers by leaving a comment on the Fling site!

How to bootstrap the VCSA using the ESXi Embedded Host Client?

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In the past, I have written about various ways of "bootstrapping" vCenter Server (here and here) which can be useful for setting up greenfield vSphere deployments. This topic has always been of interest to me because it can be the most challenging to solve, especially when you only start out with a single ESXi host. Historically, these "bootstrapping" options have mostly been driven from a CLI standpoint which is not a bad thing when you think about it from an Automation standpoint and needing to replicate this a few dozen times. However, from a user experience point of view, it may not be as ideal, especially if this is an infrequent task. One of the other cool features of the ESXi Embedded Host Client (EHC) which recently had its v4 release is that it can be used to deploy Virtual Appliances stored in the OVF format.

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Upgrading ESXi itself is now possible with the new Embedded Host Client v4

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It looks like we just got an early Christmas gift from Etienne, George and the VMware Flings team with the release of v4 of the ESXi Embedded Host Client (EHC). One of the new features that I am most excited about is the ability to upgrade ESXi itself using the "Update" feature which was first introduced in EHC v3. In the previous release of EHC, you could install or patch any ESXi VIB using this interface which I had blogged about here. With the latest release, Etienne has expanded its functionality to not only allow for a VIB URL but also a metadata.zip URL which ESXi offline bundles contain.

Here is an example of using EHC v4 to upgrade an ESXi 6.0 host to ESXi 6.0 Update 1:

Step 1 - Download ESXi offline bundle of choice, in this example we are downloading the offline bundle for ESXi 6.0 Update 1:updating-esxi-using-EHC-v4-1

Step 2 - You will need to extract the contents of the offline bundle and then upload the content to either a vSphere Datastore or an HTTP accessible URL as shown in the screenshots below.

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Currently it is not possible to upload an entire directory using the Datastore Browser with EHC. This is something I have reported internally and hopefully will be fixed in a future update.

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Step 3 - Click on the "Help" menu on the upper right hand corner of the Embedded Host Client and select the "Update" option which should prompt you to specify a URL. You can either specify a local datastore path to the metadata.zip such as the following:

/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi600-201510001/metadata.zip

or you can specify an HTTP(s) URL to the metadata.zip like the following:

http://192.168.1.180/ESXi600-201510001/metadata.zip

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Step 4 - Once you click the "Update" button, you will be asked to confirm and then you should see task kicked off called "Install Host Patch V2". Once the task has completed, you will need to reboot the ESXi host for the changes to take effect. If you are interested in viewing the update logs without having to log in via SSH, you can click on the "Monitor" tab of the Host option and under "Logs", click on /var/log/esxupdate.log to see the progress.

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If you have more than one or two hosts, I definitely recommend uploading the extracted offline bundle onto a webserver or a shared vSphere Datastore which you can the access from multiple ESXi hosts. This is a very nice way to easily upgrade your ESXi hosts without having to go into the ESXi Shell or enable SSH. Pretty neat feature if you ask me! There are many other new enhancements included in this release, be sure to give them a try and let us know if you have any feedback by leaving a comment on my blog or better yet, directly on the Fling site.

What's new in Embedded Host Client v4

  • Host
    • Ability to change host acceptance level
    • Ability to edit lock down exception users
    • Ability to edit system swap settings
  • VM
    • VM list has been optimized for performance, reducing data download by a factor of 5.
    • Ability to edit VM advance options
    • Ability to edit VM video adapter settings
    • Add a PCI pass through device (unable to remove device though)
    • SRIOV support for Network card devices
    • Ability to change browser console keyboard layout (Japanese and German are the currently supported layouts)
    • Cmd+a or Ctrl+a to select all VMs in list
    • Soft-power off and reset if Tools is installed is now supported
  • General
    • New Tools and links menu under Help
    • Update mechanism can now take a URL or data store path to an metadata zipfile, allowing to update ESXi itself
    • Localization and internationalization (French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Chinese (traditional and simplified) and Korean
    • Ability to disable session timeout
    • A huge number of bugfixes and minor improvements