WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: nested esxi

Updated method for automatically joining vCenter Server using ESXi Kickstart

by // 2 Comments

Have you ever written a script that gets the job done and years later, you go back and ask yourself ... what the heck did I do or why did I do it that way!?! 😅

Probably not as frequent as we should but I have found myself in these situations over the years, whether it is addressing an issue/enhancement or needing to explain the code to another colleague.

While copious free time is never on our side in IT, it does help to re-evaluate your automation and processes over the years to see if there are new techniques, enhancements that can make the automation more effective.

I was recently CC'ed on a Reddit thread about some automation that I had worked on more than 14 years ago that would automatically join an ESXi host to vCenter Server using an ESXi Kickstart script.

Knowing what I know now and probably even earlier, the solution of calling into the vSphere MOB and manually crafting the XML payload to join the ESXi host to a desired vSphere Cluster in vCenter Server was certainly not ideal, but it got the job done. We can certainly improve the solution leveraging a more modern solution, while still staying true to the original requirements of being able to perform vSphere Cluster addition directly from ESXi 8.x/9.x Kickstart without relying on external dependencies.

[Read more...]

NVMe Tiering with Nested Virtualization in VCF 9.0

by // 4 Comments

The NVMe Tiering feature was first previewed with the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and the feature is now officially supported with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0! ?

Since the original tech preview, all major limitations and unsupported workload profiles that would prevent an organization from deploying NVMe Tiering in production has been resolved as part of the VCF 9.0 release.

Although Nested Virtualization is NOT officially supported, many users rely on Nested ESXi for testing, development, and learning purposes. With that said, if you have NVMe Tiering enabled on an ESXi 9.0 host and you attempt to power on a Nested ESXi VM or VM that is configured with Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VHV), it will fail to power on with the following error message as shown in the screenshot below.


While it was possible to use Nested ESXi with the tech preview of NVMe Tiering, it was just not in scope as part of productizing NVMe Tiering for VCF 9.0.

All hope is not lost, while Nested Virtualization is still NOT officially supported by Broadcom, it is a very useful feature not just for our users but also for internal development purposes and after speaking with the tech lead for NVMe Tiering, this is something that will be addressed in a future update of VCF and this is just a short term limitation for now if you intend to run Nested ESXi workloads.

Enable TRIM/UNMAP from Nested vSAN OSA/ESA to physical vSAN OSA

by // Leave a Comment

If you are running Nested vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) or vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) workloads on top of a physical vSAN OSA setup, you may want to enable the Guest TRIM/UNAMP capability, which would allow your the "inner" (Nested) workloads to pass the TRIM/UNMAP requests down into your physical vSAN OSA deployment for space reclamation.

It was recently observed that storage utilization may continue to increase on a physical vSAN OSA setup even when the Nested vSAN ESA/OSA workloads have already freed up their storage, which is due to the fact that the TRIM/UNAMP commands are not being passed down into the physical vSAN OSA. If you are using vSAN ESA for your physical setup, Guest TRIM/UNMAP is already enabled by default, so this is only applicable if you are using vSAN OSA.

To enable the Guest TRIM/UNMAP capability, you need apply the following ESXi Advanced Setting to your physical vSAN OSA.

[Read more...]