WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: ovftool

Removing NSX CPU/Memory reservations when deploying a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Management or Workload Domain

by // 5 Comments

Now that you can deploy a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Management Domain onto a single ESXi host for homelab purposes, another challenge that can arise is simply having enough resources to deploy either a Management or Workload Domain.

While you do need to meet some minimum bar in terms of the amount of CPU and memory resources required to run the various components within a VCF Management or Workload Domain, I found that NSX resource requirements does add another challenge. The NSX Unified Appliance comes configured with both CPU and memory reservations, this means unless you can reserve both the required CPU and Memory for NSX, you can not power on NSX and the deployment will continue to retry until it eventually gives up.

Again, for a production environment, this is not a problem but for homelab or testing purposes, this can further restrict users from exploring the VCF solution.

I figured why not just reduce or even remove the CPU and memory reservations from the NSX OVA within the VMware Cloud Builder which is responsible for the initial VCF bringup? Well, I quickly found out why as the ISO which contains all the OVA is mounted as read-only 🙂


Luckily, all hope is not lost and this is where I learned to leverage a neat Linux kernel capability called OverlayFS which can help us! With a bit of trial/error, I was able to remove the CPU and memory reservations from the NSX appliance that is used during the deployment of a VCF Management Domain. In addition, I also ran into the same challenge when deploying a VCF Workload Domain and luckily, that was a much easier solution to figure out.

Disclaimer: This is not supported by VMware, use at your own risk. As of writing this blog post, this trick is functional on latest VCF 4.5 release.

[Read more...]

Create Windows 11 Virtual Appliance using Tiny 11 with only 2GB memory

by // Leave a Comment

I recently came to learn about a really cool project called Tiny 11 which is a stripped down version of Windows 11 Pro 22H2 that can run with just 2GB of memory and 8GB of storage. While you would probably not use this for production workloads, it could be interesting for those with homelabs and can even for demo purposes.

Disclaimer: Tiny 11 is not an official project from Microsoft, use at your own risk. If you are interested in creating an optimized Windows 10 or 11 image, you can also check out these VMware resources here and here to produce a similiar size image using official Microsoft tools and images.

UPDATE (02/16/23) - There is now an Arm version for Tiny 11, which is great for anyone using the ESXi-Arm Fling and the technique in this blog post would also apply.

After performing a manual installation of Tiny 11, I thought it would be neat if I could build a Virtual Appliance (OVA) for Tiny 11 and also add custom OVF properties, which would allow anyone to customize the OS further without having to rely on any external tooling.

In fact, I had demonstrated this concept back in 2019 using Windows Server 2016 in this blog post and I figure it should be easy enough to also do the same for Tiny 11 or even standard Windows 11! With a bit of trial/error, I was indeed able to create a simple Tiny 11 OVA that includes the following OVF properties as shown in the screenshot below.


My initial goal was to fully automate the building of a Tiny 11 OVA with custom OVF properties using Packer. However, after many attempts, I was not able to figure out the correct autoattended.xml configuration and decided on a semi-manual approach which is detailed in the instructions below. If anyone is able to figure out how to get Tiny 11 installed via Packer, then I may revisit this topic and automate the remainder of the setup.

Note: The instructions below are not specific to Tiny 11 in any way and is also applicable to standard Windows 10 or 11 image.

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Easily move or copy VMs between two Free ESXi hosts?

by // 10 Comments

There are many options when it comes to moving or copying Virtual Machine(s) across two ESXi hosts that are fully licensed and can be managed by a vCenter Server, but what about standalone ESXi hosts that only use the Free ESXi Hypervisor license?

Luckily, we have a couple of native solutions from VMware that not only work, but they are completely free to use, which some folks may not even realize!

[Read more...]