WilliamLam.com

Customizing SMBIOS strings (hardware manufacturer and vendor) for Nested ESXi 

by // 10 Comments

Nested ESXi continues to be an invaluable resource that I use on almost a daily basis from solution prototyping, customer reproduction to automated lab deployments supporting both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), the use cases are simply endless!

While you can do almost anything with Nested ESXi, mimicking or simulating specific hardware strings such as the manufacturer or vendor is not really possible or at least very easily. I was recently reminded of this topic again as this has been something I wanted to look into but just not had the time. In fact, some of this was inspired by a conversation I had with fellow colleague Luke Huckaba who found a clever trick playing with the default Virtual Machine boot ROMs which are shipped with both ESXi and our VMware Desktop Hypervisors (Workstation/Fusion).

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Workaround for unsupported processor error in Windows 11 for Arm on VMware Fusion

by // Leave a Comment

This morning I came across an intriguing post on the VMware Reddit channel where a user had ran into an issue while attempting to upgrade their Windows 11 on Arm VM, running VMware Fusion on an Apple Silicon system. The error message stated that the CPU processor is not currently supported for Windows as you can see from the screenshot below:

After sharing the thread internally, I immediately got an answer back from one of the VMware Fusion Engineers and this issue looks to have also recently impacted UTM and luckily, there was an easy solution using the following Windows registry hack:

  • Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsSelfHost\Applicability : BranchName -> CanaryChannel
  • Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsSelfHost\UI\Selection : UIBranch -> CanaryChannel

After applying the registry tweak, the VMware Fusion Engineer confirmed Windows Update was now able to successfully start as shared with their screenshot below.

Creating an offline VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Depot for multiple VCF environments

by // 4 Comments

By default, SDDC Manager uses the online VMware Depot for downloading all software updates (security, patch, upgrade) for life-cycling a single VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) instance. SDDC Manager can also support air-gapped or disconnected environments by leveraging the VCF Offline Bundle Transfer Utility (OBTU), which my colleague Eric Gray recently published a detailed blog post demo'ing OBTU.

While a solution exists for managing an air-gapped VCF environment, the process can be time consuming if you have to support multiple VCF environment as you need to transfer all VCF bundles from where the OBTU is running to each individual SDDC Manager. Ideally, you vi  just host your own offline VCF Depot that all SDDC Managers can simply point to, similar to what is used by vCenter Server with the their Update Manager Download Service (UMDS).

Luckily, an offline depot is not a foreign concept for VCF and while researching this topic, I was even pointed to this old 2020 blog post in creating your own local VCF 3.x depot, but the process was out of date and more importantly, OBTU was not available at the time.

By leveraging a combination of OBTU and the 2020 blog post, I was able to come up with an updated process to create an offline VCF depot that could be used by multiple VCF environments. I was able to successfully validate my offline VCF depot by applying the latest VCF 5.1.1 update to my existing VCF 5.x environment!

[Read more...]