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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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Automated Nested Lab Deployment on SDDC Part 4: Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

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In this final blog series, we are now going to take a look at deploying our Nested Lab in an Oracle Cloud VMware Solution environment. Similiar to GCVE, we also will have the ability to run Nested vSAN on top of the physical vSAN within OCVS and by default, customers are provided with the full administrator credentials. For networking, customers also have full access to the NSX-T Manager instance and this means that MAC Learning can be enabled and will allow inner-guest workloads will be able to communicate properly within and outside of the Nested Lab deployment.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi is not officially supported on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution or by VMware.

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