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Failed to locate kickstart on Nested ESXi VM CD-ROM in VCF 9.0

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If you are automating the installation of ESXi using a scripted installation (aka Kickstart) and the KS.CFG is located on a CD-ROM device and you happen to be using a Nested ESXi VM and see the following message:

cannot find kickstart file on cd-rom with path -- /KS.CFG


You are probably using an IDE-based controller for the CD-ROM device, which the underlying IDE driver for ESXi has been removed as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.


The fix is to simply remove the IDE controller and use a SATA controller and things will work as expected!

Quick Tip - Automating cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic configuration for ESXi Kickstart with USB

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To prevent ESXi from PSOD'ing when an Intel Hybrid Consumer CPU is detected with non-uniform capabilities, a workaround can be applied to ignore the uniformity miss-match which is needed before the ESXi installer fully boots up and also after the initial reboot.

For those looking to fully automate this process using ESXi Kickstart using USB as an example, there are two places where the kernel boot option must be added:

1) The first is the EFI\boot\boot.cfg file on the ESXi installer media (e.g. USB) where you will append to the kernelopt line as shown in the snippet below:

bootstate=0
title=Loading ESXi installer
timeout=5
prefix=
kernel=/b.b00
kernelopt=ks=usb:/KS.CFG cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic=FALSE
.....

2) The second must be added to the %post section of your ESXi kickstart, which will update the first ESXi bootbank's boot.cfg and ensure the kernel option is passed to ESXi when it reboots after installation:

%post --interpreter=busybox

sed -i '/^kernelopt=/ s/$/ cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic=FALSE/' /vmfs/volumes/BOOTBANK1/boot.cfg

How to setup private GitLab on a Synology for Project Keswick?

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My recent blog post on setting up a custom vSphere Content Library on my Synology gave me another idea that I had been thinking about regarding Project Keswick, which was announced back at VMware Explore Las Vegas.

If you have network connectivity to the Keswick Cloud Service, you can easily associate a Git repository, which is used for host configurations and workload deployments using GitOps using Github or even a privately managed Gitlab instance. For organizations that have additional compliance, security or air-gapped requirements, using the Keswick Cloud Service may not be an option. With that said, Project Keswick also supports an advanced deployment option where the association of a Git repository, such as GitLab, can also be accomplished without requiring the use of the Keswick Cloud Service.

While I have had experience using both Github as well as GitLab, which VMware uses to host its own code repository, I have actually never setup my own GitLab instance before. I thought this would be a great learning opportunity, especially with the ability to run additional add-on applications on a Synology.

After a bit of researching online, I found that GitLab can easily run as a Container workload and it just so happens that the Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) has a package for running containers creatively called Container Manager and below are the step by step instructions for setting up GitLab running on Synology DSM 7.2.

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