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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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How to host your own simple ESXi update depot?

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I recently upgraded my single ESXi host, which is used for my personal vSphere Homelab, to the latest patch release of ESXi 7.0 Update 3e using ESXCLI and connecting directly to VMware's online depot.

This is the same method that I have been using since 2012 when I first wrote about this in a blog post using a pretty cool method of upgrading/patching a single ESXi hosts. If you are fortunate to have multiple ESXi hosts and a vCenter Server, you definitely should be using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) provided by vCenter Server rather than the ESXCLI method, especially as there are no upgrade pre-checks built into in compared to vLCM.

Although my environment has a vCenter Server, I can not use vLCM because I only have a single ESXi host and ESXCLI method is really the only viable option. Customers may have a simliar setup, whether that is for a homelab, smaller environment or simply do not have a vCenter Server. Using the ESXCLI workflow, it certainly is the easiest if your ESXi host can reach VMware's online repo which is hosted at hostupdate.vmware.com, however this may not be possible for everyone, especially for remote locations where connectivity may be spotty or simply is not allowed to have outbound connectivity.

For such environments, you might be interested in hosting your own ESXi update repo and as always, I was curious on how one could setup something simliar without much effort and well, here we are with this blog post 😀

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Quick Tip - Using ESXi Scripted Installation (kickstart) to configure IPv6 networking

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I have written numerous articles on the topic of ESXi Scripted Installation aka Kickstart, which is just one of the many options that enables customers to fully automate the installation and configuration of their ESXi hosts. An interesting question that recently came up internally was whether you could configure ESXi networking using IPv6, rather than IPv4 using the default ESXi Kickstart network parameters?

If you look at the ESXi network params as they are labeled such as netmask, it would seem that these are only applicable to IPv4. Although my personal experience has been exclusively IPv4, I figure I would take a quick look at the python code which powers the ESXi Kickstart infrastructure which is located under /usr/lib/vmware/weasel directory. Although I am not a Developer, from what I could grok, it seems like IPv6 might actually be possible using these exact same parameters.

Using Nested ESXi and the new vSphere 7.0 Update 2 feature HTTP Boot over virtual EFI, I was able to setup a quick prototype to validate that you can indeed configure IPv6 using the same ESXi networking parameters, which are applicable to both IPv4 and IPv6.

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