WilliamLam.com

ESXi 5.1 Officially Certified on Apple Mac Pro

by // 5 Comments

If you are still trying to catch up with all the awesomeness that has been shared, blogged, tweeted, etc. about in the last 24hrs with the announcement of the new vCloud Suite 5.1 release, here is one additional tidbit to add to that list which you might not have heard about it. With the release of ESXi 5.1, the Apple Mac Pro is now officially supported!

I came across this little tidbit from some folks internally who have been working hard to get the Mac Pro platform certified and supported on ESXi. After the vCloud Suite went live, I did a quick search on the VMware HCL and sure enough, the Apple Mac Pro was listed with support for ESXi 5.1.

If you recall back when vSphere 5.0 was released, VMware introduced support for ESXi to run on Apple's XServe ... unfortunately, Apple had decided to announce it's EOL (End of Life) several months prior which made it difficult to purchase and rely on the XServe as a platform. The only way you could get your hands on an XServe is if you were one of the few who purchased them before the EOL date (I personally went through this) or you were willing to look on Ebay. Luckily, now with the latest release of ESXi 5.1, if you need to virtualize Mac OSX Server Virtual Machines and other guestOSes, you can do so using the Apple Mac Pro.

Nested ESXi 5.1 Supports VMXNET3 Network Adapter Type

by // 15 Comments

I noticed something interesting while extracting the contents of ESXi 5.1 ISO for some kickstart configurations ....

Do you see it? It's a VMXNET3 driver for the VMkernel! I also confirmed by running the following ESXCLI command querying for the VMkernel module "vmxnet3":

# esxcli system module get -m vmxnet3
Module: vmxnet3
Module File: /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/vmxnet3
License: GPL
Version: Version 1.1.32.0, Build: 799733, Interface: 9.2 Built on: Aug  1 2012
Signed Status:
Signature Issuer:
Signature Digest:
Signature FingerPrint:
Provided Namespaces:
Required Namespaces: [email protected], com.vmware.vmkapi@v2_1_0_0

***Disclaimer***: This is for educational purposes only, this is not officially supported by VMware. Use at your own risk. There is also a mention of this in the vSphere 5.1 release notes that VMs running on nested ESXi hosts using VMXNET3 driver could potentially crash. Again, not supported user at your own risk.

Next I decided to create a Nested ESXi 5.1 VM, but instead of selecting the e1000 driver which was the only network adapter type that would function for running a nested ESXi host, I choose the VMXNET3 adapter and to my surprise ESXi's networking stack was fully functional.

You can see from the above screenshot, I have a two VMXNET3 network adapters for my nested ESXi 5.1 VM. Here are two additional screenshot of the physical adapters as seen by nested ESXi 5.1 host and you can see that it shows up as VMware Inc. VMXNET3

I have not tried any performance tests, so not sure if there are going to be any significant benefits but pretty cool nonetheless!

Configuring New vSphere Web Client Session Timeout

by // 5 Comments

Just like you could in the old vSphere C# Client, users can also configure a session timeout for the new vSphere Web Client in the latest release of vSphere 5.1. This not only ensures that idle sessions automatically disconnect after a certain period of time but also helps reduce the resources consumed on the vCenter Server as each session allocates a certain amount of resources.

To configure the session timeout, you will need to login to the server running the vSphere Web Client service (which is usually your vCenter Server) and find the webclient.properties file and change the default timeout and then restart the vSphere Web Client service. For the VCSA, the default timeout value is 120 minutes and I assume it is the same default for the Windows vCenter Server.

Step 1 - Locate the webclient.properties file:

    VCSA 5.x

/var/lib/vmware/vsphere-client/webclient.properties

    VCSA 6.x

/etc/vmware/vsphere-client/webclient.properties

    Windows vCenter Server 5.x

%ALLUSERPROFILE%\VMware\vCenterServer\cfg\vsphere-client\webclient.properties

    Windows vCenter Server 6.x

%ALLUSERPROFILE%\VMware\vSphere Web Client\webclient.properties

Step 2 - Un-comment and change session.timeout value to desired value:

session.timeout = 120

Step 3 - Restart the vSphere Web Client Service:

/etc/init.d/vsphere-client restart

You will need to restart the vSphere Web Client service for the changes to go into effect. For the Windows vCenter Server, just restart the vSphere Web Client service and for the VCSA, run the above command.

In my lab, I configured the time out to be 1 minute, once the session has gone idle for the configured period, you will automatically be logged out and brought back to login page with the following message: