WilliamLam.com

Using HTTP with VCF 9.0 Installer for Offline Depot

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After deploying the new VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Installer appliance, the first thing you must setup is the software depot which is where the VCF Installer will go to download the software binaries for deploying either VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

Users have two options to select from:

  • Online Depot - Connect over the internet to Broadcom (directly or in-directly via network proxy), which will require a download token to be provided
  • Offline Depot - Connect locally to a depot that you have setup (using the VCF Download Tool) within your own environment

By default, the VCF Installer connects to Broadcom's online depot using HTTPS, which is expected when connecting over the public internet. With that said, for an offline depot that is running within your own infrastructure, you can simplify the offline depot setup by serving the content over HTTP, which also removes the need to setup a TLS certificate for your web server.

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Crowdsourced Lab Hardware for ESXi 9.0 Dashboard

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For a major new vSphere release, it can be challenging to understand whether your existing hardware will continue to work or if you need to upgrade.

During the development of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, I had put together a survey that would crowdsource from internal users who have successfully installed ESXi 9.0, so that it can be used as a reference for the community. We have almost 50 submissions, including details about the hardware platform but the also the different key I/O devices across networking, storage and graphics! I would like to give a big thanks to all the VMware/Broadcom employees who contributed to the initial dataset and I hope to see this grow as our users start to play with VCF 9.0 in their lab envionments

You can view the dashboard results by visiting: https://lamw.github.io/community-lab-hardware-for-esxi9/

If you would like to contribute your own system that has NOT already been submitted, please fill out this form here: https://forms.gle/dXbzpTz4JpwP8bXr7

Automating the vSAN Data Migration Pre-check using vSAN API

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I was chatting with a customer yesterday on various automation topics and one of the questions was about automating the vSAN Data Migration Pre-Check capablitity, which is available in the vSphere UI under vSAN Cluster->Monitor->vSAN->Data Migration Pre-check as shown in the screenshot below.


The specific vSAN API that you will need to use is both the VsanPerformResourceCheck to perform the operation and then VsanGetResourceCheckStatus to retrieve the results as the operation can take some time depending on the size of your environment.

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