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Generating a vSphere UI link to a specific Virtual Machine

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For some organizations, after a VM has been provisioned, it is customary to send a notification (email, slack, etc) to their end users with login credentials including the URL for the vSphere UI.

Typically, the provided URL is just the vCenter Server base URL and end users would then have to login and navigate to their specific VM(s) within the vSphere Inventory. A question was brought up on whether a better end user experience could be provided to their internal users? They were interested in providing their end users with a specific URL link that would take them directly to their VM, which they can also bookmark for future uses.

Furthermore, the customer was also interested in generating the URL programmatically, so that it can be incorporated into their existing provisioning workflows.

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ESX Server 1.0 - Trip down memory lane

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I recently had a bit of VMware Nostalgia and for the past several weeks, I have been working on a personal skunk works project in trying to locate all major ESX and ESXi releases over the past 22 years including ESX Server 1.0 which was released by VMware back in 2001!

To my surprise, finding a digital copy of ESX pre-2.0 (1.0 & 1.5) was much harder than I had expected. Back in those early days, software was not commonly distributed over the internet like it is today, instead it was sent to vendors to create physical CD/DVD discs, which was then shipped to customers and partners. I had also reached out to many tenured folks at VMware who were still around from the early days, but each response lead to another set of folks and it typically either went in a circle or to a dead end. This was turning into an archeological hunt.

I decided to give it one more shot and I pinged John Arrasjid aka VCDX #1 and after a bit of searching, John actually found a pristine copy of ESX Server 1.0, still sealed in the box! Given how difficult it was to locate a 1.0 copy of ESX, we thought it was worth opening up and to preserve this VMware history by creating a digital ISO image, so that I could then share the experience of installing ESX 1.0 with the broader VMware community.

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How to enable passthrough for USB Network Adapters claimed by ESXi CDCE Driver?

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As part of vSphere 7.0, ESXi now ships with a USB CDCE (Communication Device Class Ethernet) driver which can benefit customers with SB network adapters that support the CDCE specification as shared in this blog post HERE. This can especially be useful for those running a VMware Homelab where the onboard network adapter may not be supported and using a CDCE USB network adapter would allow you to install ESXi.

When a CDCE-supported USB network adapter is connected to an ESXi host, it will automatically be claimed by the CDCE driver as shown in the screenshot below.


If you are planning to use the USB network adapter for VMkernel traffic, then there is no workflow change like any other physical network adapter. However, if you intend to passthrough the USB network adapter to a VM, then you may find that it is not working as expected.


The reason for this is that ESXi has already claimed the USB device, assuming you wish to use it for VMkernel traffic. To change the behavior for a particular CDCE-supported USB network adapter, we just need to apply a USB Quirk which tells ESXi to ignore this adapter.

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