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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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Self-Contained & Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment using new VLC Holodeck Toolkit

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I recently came to learn about a really neat solution that was released called the VMware Cloud Foundation Lab Constructor (VLC) Holodeck Toolkit, which makes it super easy for anyone to deploy a complete functional VCF environment, fully self-contained and deploys all the required networking and infrastructure services that dramatically reduces the amount of time and effort to deploy a VCF environment for evaluation or learning purposes.

What is unique about the VLC Holodeck Toolkit is that it ships with a special vPodRouter VM, which provides all the networking and connectivity that is required to deploy a typical production VCF environment. If this sounds familiar, this is exactly how VMware Hands-On-Labs (HOL) works where isolated networking is provided to each "vPod" through their vPodRouter VM. In addition, the VLC Holodeck Toolkit also builds a custom Windows Jumphost (bastion) ISO that includes all the infrastructure services like DNS, Directory, Certificate Authority, etc. that is fully configured and ready to use once it is deployed and this is how users interact with the VCF environment.

With the VLC Holodeck Toolkit providing and building all the necessary "virtual" infrastructure, the barrier to entry is further reduced and customers can easily stand up a fully functional VCF environment running on just a single ESXi host without any special physical networking requirements. For a detailed overview of the solution, check out overview video below.


After learning about the solution, I also had the opportunity to kick the tires and provide some early feedback, which included a few additional optimizations that made its way back into the toolkit. For those interested, below is the high level workflow to go from a single ESXi host with minimal configuration to a fully functional VCF environment.

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