Back on the first of April, I had shared the following video:
While many thought it was an April Fools's joke, that was certainly the original intention, but I also wanted the joke to be based on something realistic and not made up. Everything that you saw in that video is completely real, this was a real ESXCLI command that integrated with ChatGPT and was running on an ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release! 😊
So how did I do it?
After publishing my recent article on how to audit vCenter Cloud Gateway and vCenter Server registrations for the vSphere+ Cloud Service, I thought it would also be useful to share some tips on how you can easily find your existing vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) deployment(s) within your environment?
You might wonder, do I not already know about my VCGW deployment(s) or for that matter any other solution that is deployed within my own infrastructure? Yes, that would ideally be the case and you should also be able to look that up in your change management database (CMDB). However, over the years in speaking to many customers and hearing about some of the requests from our field teams, I have come to learn that this nirvana state does not exist for many of our customers.
In some organizations, it has been described as the wild wild west where teams of administrators with access to their vSphere environment can deploy any number of solution without ever communicating amongst each other to organizations that provide shared infrastructure access to other small teams and/or companies with a simliar set of challenges. Net net, it is certainly possible that solutions like the VCGW gateway may have been deployed or potentially even retired but have not been removed from your environment.
Songtao and I are happy to share that we now have a compatible version of the USB Network Native Driver for ESX v1.12 Fling that supports the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release! 🥳
This release also includes a couple of minor enhancement and fixes which are listed below:
Additionally, while ESXi 8.0 Update 1 has just been released, we know that not everyone will be on the latest version and these enhancement and fixes have also been ported to a version of USB Network Native Driver for ESX v1.12 Fling driver to also support ESXi 8.0, 8.0a, 8.0b, etc.
Use the following ESXi Component ZIP files based on your desired version of ESXi 8.x:
Note: There are no plans to backport these enhancements/fixes to prior ESXi releases
Finally, if you are looking to create a custom ESXi ISO or Image Profile AND you either have an existing or can deploy a vCenter Server, please refer to this blog post for using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) via the UI or PowerCLI to create your custom images.
If you do NOT have or can not deploy a vCenter Server (no hosts required), then you can refer to this blog post for using PowerCLI Image Builder to create your custom images, but make sure you update Python dependency to at least 3.7.9+ or you will run into this issue.