WilliamLam.com

How to replace some of ESXi Kickstart automation with new configstorecli commands?

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I had received a question a couple of weeks back from a customer who was already automating their ESXi installation using ESXi Kickstart, also known as ESXi Scripted Installation but they had ran into an issue when migrating the exact same automation to the latest ESXi 7.0 releases.

The method the customer was using to manage their ESXi password policies, which was by updating the /etc/pam.d/passwd file, no longer function as expected and this was a result of the introduction of the ESXi ConfigStore, which I have written about here.

As mentioned in the article, the goal of the ESXi ConfigStore is the following:

The goal of the ConfigStore, initially introduced in ESXi 7.0 Update 1, is to centrally manage all configurations for an ESXi host instead of relying on different methods including a variety of configuration files.

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ESXi on AMD ChangWang CW56-58

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It can be pretty difficult to find an AMD-based small form factor (SFF) kit that is compatible with recent ESXi releases. The large majority of these AMD SFF kits all use Realtek for their onboard network adaptor and Realtek does not have a driver for ESXi, nor have they expressed any interests in creating one.

This is also quite unfortunate, as there have been some pretty interesting AMD kits that have been released in the market, but they can not be fully utilized due to the network driver challenges. Prior to the holiday break, fellow VMware colleague Hilko Lantinga, who works in our End User Computing (EUC) division had reached out about a new AMD kit that he had just acquired and has been very happy with after putting it through its paces, especially from a power efficiency standpoint for his updated VMware Homelab.

The system is from a vendor called ChangWang, which I was not familiar with and the AMD kit is the CW56-58, which is based on an AMD Zen 3 architecture (7nm) and what stands out immediately is that this system includes four built-in network adaptors (hint: they are all compatible with latest ESXi 8.0 release)! I asked if he would be willing to sharing his thorough review with the community as this could be a really interesting system and below is Hilko's detailed write-up in his own words.


The following content below is a contribution from Hilko Lantinga.

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Quick Tip - How to check if vSAN TRIM/UNMAP is enabled in VMware Cloud on AWS Cluster?

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While the original question was for checking whether a specific VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A) cluster has the vSAN TRIIM/UNMAP feature enabled, the solutions below is applicable to any recent vSAN 7.x or 8.x deployment. There are two ways you check, either using the vSphere UI by selecting the cluster and navigating to Configure->vSAN->Services and expanding the Advanced Options tile or simply leveraging PowerCLI and the vSAN API to retrieve the exact same information.

vSphere UI

vSAN API using PowerCLI

$clusterName = "Cluster-1"
$vsanConfigSystem = Get-VsanView -Id VsanVcClusterConfigSystem-vsan-cluster-config-system
$clusterMoRef = (Get-Cluster $clusterName).ExtensionData.MoRef
$vsanConfigSystem.VsanClusterGetConfig($clusterMoRef).unmapConfig