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Quick Tip - Automating ESXi 8.0 install using allowLegacyCPU=true

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For those looking to install ESXi 8.0 but have an unsupported CPU, the following kernel boot option allowLegacyCPU=true can be added which would bypass the installer pre-check as shown in the screenshot below.

When the ESXi installer bypass happens, instead of an error which forces you to reboot, you will get a warning message and user must acknowledge they understand they are using an unsupported CPU and then continue with the installation.

UPDATE (10/05/23) - ESXi 8.0 Update 2 requires CPU processors that support XSAVE instruction or you will not be able to upgrade and means you will hardware with a minimum of an Intel Sandy Bridge or AMD Bulldozer processor or later.

Note: For more information, also checkout my vSphere 8 Homelab considerations blog post for more tips and tricks.

For an interactive installation of ESXi, the additional acknowledgment is not an issue but for an automated installation of ESXi using Kickstart, this can be a problem since you are still required to manually hit enter before the installation actually begins. The question from a couple of my readers, is there a workaround for this?

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Introducing VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) - Tanzu Kubernetes for everyone!

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A very exciting new project was just announced at the DevOps Loop Conference called Tanzu Community Edition or TCE for short.

What is TCE and why should you care?

Today, it can be challenging for end users (administrators, architects, developers, platform operators, etc.) to get first hand experience with VMware's Tanzu portfolio. Some of the challenges can include downloading the software, licensing the software and having the required resources to run the software.

TCE aims to provide a frictionless experience for anyone that wants to get hands with an enterprise grade Kubernetes platform, that is fully featured with our Tanzu commercial offerings. TCE is easy to use, freely available for anyone to download and use for learning, testing, development and pre-production purposes.

In addition, TCE also includes newer features that are not found in the Tanzu commercial offering (yet) and early experimental features that the community will be the first to try out! As features further develop and mature based on feedback from the community, they will eventually graduate into our commercial offerings.
Not only does TCE provide access to the same commercial offering of our Kubernetes runtime called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), but it also includes additional packages that can be optionally installed that can help with building, managing, deploying and running modern applications and services.

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Quick Tip - Preserving FQDN hostname on Photon OS

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Over the weekend, I was troubleshooting an issue that was reported by one of our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) users who was helping with testing one of our upcoming features. The user found that after rebooting the VEBA appliance, the Antrea interfaces were no longer being re-created and pod networking seems to have been broken.

We initially thought it was related to switching to the latest Photon OS version or updating to the latest Antrea CNI release, since everything else was pretty much the same. Even after reverting both versions back to what we initially had, the reboot issue continued to persist. What was even more strange was that the current shipping version of the VEBA (v0.6.1) OVA was not experiencing this issue and had no problems with an OS reboot, which is something I have done many times.

The only logical conclusion that I could come up with to explain this problem is that a behavior change must have occurred within Photon OS from the time we built the previous appliance to what we are seeing now. While troubleshooting Antrea, it was pointed out that Kubernetes (K8s) node is probably unhealth and if so, I may want to look at the kubelet logs to see if it provided any hints. I initially did not both looking at the K8s layer, thinking this was related to change in Antrea since it handled pod networking. Looking at the kubelet logs, I found a ton of entries with the following:

396 kubelet.go:2243] node "veba" not found

I thought this was a bit strange, especially as our appliance has its hostname configurred with a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) which is veba.primp-industries.local and we had proper entries in both /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts.

Sure enough, when I ran hostname, they all returned the short hostname instead of the FQDN (which it returned properly prior to the reboot)

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