WilliamLam.com

ESXi 6.5 Virtual Appliance is now available

11.18.2016 by William Lam // 32 Comments

The much anticipated release of vSphere 6.5 has officially GA'ed and you can find all the release notes and downloads over here. Just like prior releases, I have created a new Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance to aide in quickly setting up a vSphere 6.5 environment for both educational as well as lab purposes. If you have not used this Virtual Appliance before, I strongly recommend you thoroughly review this blog post here for the background before proceeding further.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, please use this at your own risk (the usual).

The new ESXi 6.5 Virtual Appliance includes the following configuration:

ESXi 6.5 OS [New]
GuestType: ESXi 6.5[New]
vHW 11 [New]
2 vCPU
6GB vMEM
2 x VMXNET vNIC
1 x PVSCSI Adapter [New]
1 x 2GB HDD (ESXi Installation)
1 x 4GB SSD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
1 x 8GB SSD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
VHV added (more info here)
dvFilter Mac Learn VMX params added (more info here)
disk.enableUUID VMX param added
VSAN traffic tagged on vmk0
Disabled VSAN device monitoring for home labs (more info here)
VMFS6 will be used if user selects to create VMFS volume [New]
Enabled sparse swap (more info here) [New]

To be able to import and use this new ESXi VA, you will need to be running at least vSphere 6.0 Update 2 in your environment as I take advantage of some of the new Nested ESXi enhancements in vSphere 6.5. If you need to run ESXi 6.5 on earlier versions of vSphere, then you can take my existing 5.5 or 6.0 VAs and manually upgrade to 6.5.

Now that you made it this far, here is download: Nested_ESXi6.5d_Appliance_Template_v1.ova

Lastly, I have also spent some time building some new automation scripts which takes advantage of my Nested ESXi VAs and deploys a fully functional vSphere lab environment without even breaking a sweat. Below is a little sneak peak at what you can expect 😀 Watch the blog for more details!

Default hashing algorithm changed in OVFTool 4.2 preventing OVF/OVA import using vSphere C# Client

11.18.2016 by William Lam // 11 Comments

After upgrading my home lab recently to vSphere 6.5, I also updated some of the related utilities such as the various SDKs and CLIs. One of the CLIs that I had updated was the latest version of OVFTool which is now at 4.2. I use OVFTool extensively to automate various Virtual Machine deployments (import/export). While testing out a new OVA that I had been working on, I needed to verify that it also worked with previous release of vSphere like vSphere 6.0 Update 2. I happen to have the vSphere C# Client open and connected to a vCenter Server and when I tried to import the newly created OVA, but it failed with the following error message:

The following manifest file entry(line1) is invalid: SHA256

I was pretty surprised by this since I went through this exact same workflow a couple of days ago without any problems. The only change that had happened was OVFTool and error seems to indicate an issue with the hashing algorithm. I ran OVFTool again using just the --help option to check what the default SHA hashing algorithm was, it was SHA256. I then compared that to an older version of OVFTool and it looks like the default had changed from SHA1 to SHA256.

From a security standpoint, this is a positive change as SHA1 is no longer considered a secure hashing algorithm and a stronger version should be used. It also turns out that the vSphere C# Client can only support SHA1 which is why I received the error after upgrading to the new version of OVFTool. Luckily, this is NOT a problem when using the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere HTML5 Client and only affects the vSphere C# Client. If you do need to use the vSphere C# Client for importing OVF/OVAs exported from the latest version of OVFTool, the workaround is quite simple, just override the default hashing algorithim when exporting by adding the additional CLI option:

--shaAlgorithm=sha1

USB 3.0 Ethernet Adapter (NIC) driver for ESXi 6.5

11.17.2016 by William Lam // 189 Comments

I had several folks ask me about an updated USB 3.0 Ethernet Driver for ESXi 6.5, similar to what I had created for ESXi 5.5 and 6.0. There were some changes that came with ESXi 6.5 and thanks to Songtao, I was able to build a new driver. For those of you who are not familiar with this particular driver, I highly recommend you give this article here a read before proceeding any further. If you are interested in Realtek driver for ESXi 6.5, be sure to check out Jose's blog here for more info.

UPDATE (02/12/19) - A new VMware Native Driver for USB-based NICs has just been released for ESXi 6.5/6.7, please use this driver going forward. If you are still on ESXi 5.5/6.0, you can continue using the existing driver but please note there will be no additional development in the existing vmklinux-based driver.

UPDATE (04/23/18) - For folks who plan to upgrade or install ESXi 6.7, you can continue using the 6.5 driver. I've had several folks reach out and share there have not been any issues and upgrades will preserver the USB NIC driver or you can perform a fresh install and follow the steps below.

To use this new driver for ESXi 6.5, there are some additional steps that is required. Below are the instructions on how to install this on an ESXi 6.5 host.

Step 0 - Download the ESXi 6.5 USB Ethernet Adapter Driver VIB or ESXi 6.5 USB Ethernet Adapter Driver Offline Bundle and upload it to your ESXi host.

Step 1 - If you are upgrading from an existing ESXi 5.5 or 6.0 environment, the first thing you will want to do is uninstall the old driver by running the following command (specify the correct name of the driver):

esxcli software vib remove -n vghetto-ax88179-esxi60u2

Step 2 - Install the VIB by running the following ESXCLI command to install:

esxcli software vib install -v /vghetto-ax88179-esxi65.vib -f

Step 3 - Next, you will need to disable the USB native driver to be able to use this driver. To do so, run the following command:

esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=FALSE

Step 4 - Lastly, for the changes to go into effect, you will need to reboot your ESXi host. Once your system has rebooted, it should now automatically load the USB Ethernet driver and you should see your USB Ethernet Adapter as shown in the screenshot below.

Step 5 - ESXi does not natively support USB NIC and upon a reboot, the USB NICs are not picked up until much later in the boot process which prevents them from being associated with VSS/VDS and their respective portgroups. To ensure things are connected properly after a reboot, you will need to add something like the following in /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh which re-links the USB NIC along with the individual portgroups as shown in the example below.

esxcfg-vswitch -L vusb0 vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch -M vusb0 -p "Management Network" vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch -M vusb0 -p "VM Network" vSwitch0

You will also need to run /sbin/auto-backup.sh to ensure the configuration changes are saved and then you can issue a reboot to verify that everything is working as expected.