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Quick Tip - New method to mark HDD to SSD in ESXi 7.x and 8.x using ESXCLI

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I recently helped a colleague who wanted to mark an HDD device in ESXi to show up as an SSD, which may be needed if the storage device was not correctly detected or if you are using Nested ESXi and the underlying storage is not an SSD and you need to mark it as an SSD for use with vSAN OSA or ESA.

The easiest way to accomplish this operation is by using the vSphere UI, but that does require vCenter Server to be up and running, which it was not. Alternatively, you can also perform this operation using ESXCLI and configure an Storage Array-Type Plugin (SATP) claim rules, which had been possible since 2013 but it looks like the old method no longer works in the latest ESXi 7.x and 8.x releases.

Note: If you are configuring this for a Nested ESXi VM, another method is to emulate a virtual SSD as shown in this blog post.

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vSphere 8.0 Update 1c resolves Windows VBS performance & Hyper-V Generation 2 Nested VM running on AMD CPU

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vSphere 8.0 Update 1c was just released and one of the resolved issues mentioned in the ESXi release notes is the following:

Nested virtual machines on AMD CPUs with operational systems such as Windows with virtualization-based security (VBS) might experience performance degradation, timeouts, or unresponsiveness due to an issue with the virtualization of AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), also known as Nested Page Tables (NPT).

UPDATE (10/11/23) - This is also resolved in the ESXi 7.0 Update 3o release

There are two scenarios in which this fix resolves:

  1. Running Windows Server VM with a Hyper-V enabled Generation 2 VM (Nested Virtualization) on AMD CPU
  2. Running Windows Server VM with VBS Enabled (Non-Nested VM) on AMD CPU

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Changing the default HTTP(s) Reverse Proxy Ports on ESXi 8.0

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The process of changing the default ports for the ESXi Reverse Proxy service has always been pretty straight forward, which I had also shared back in 2015 HERE. While most customers stick with the default configuration (80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS), we do have some customers that need to change these ports to meet certain organization security and/or compliance requirements.

Disclaimer: VMware does not officially support modifying the default HTTP/HTTPS ports on an ESXi host.

I recently came across a customer report where the previous method for changing the ESXi Reverse Proxy ports on an 8.0 host no longer worked and the only thing that was shared was that the user could no longer run ESXCLI directly within the ESXi Shell, which I thought was a strange observation.

I deployed the latest ESXi 8.0b as a Nested ESXi VM and I went through the instructions I had outlined in my blog post HERE and changed the HTTPS port from 443 to 4444, which was the setup the user was looking to do and I ran into the exact same issue. At first, I thought maybe we actually no longer support this capability and decided to quickly test by using the remote version of ESXCLI, which allows you to specify a port as part of the connection and it failed with the same error.

UPDATE (07/31/23) - For ESXi 8.0 Update 1 instructions, please refer to this blog post HERE.

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