Search Results for: vsphere MOB

Thunderbolt 3 enclosures with (Single, Dual & Quad) M.2 NVMe SSDs for ESXi

06.03.2019 by William Lam // 15 Comments

Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) and eventually USB 4 is a really fascinating technology and I believe it still has so much untapped potential, especially when looking at Remote/Branch Office (ROBO), Edge and IoT types of deployments. TB3 was initially limited to Apple-based platforms, but in the last couple of years, adoption has been picking up across a number of PC desktop/laptops including the latest generations of Intel NUCs which are quite popular for vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Labs. My hope with USB 4 is that in the near future, we will start to see servers with this interface show up in the datacenter 🙂

In the mean time, I have been doing some work with TB3 from a home lab standpoint. Some of you may have noticed my recent work on enabling Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE for ESXi and it should be no surprise that the next logical step was TB3 storage. Using a Thunderbolt interface to connect to external storage, usually Fibre Channel is something many of our customers have been doing for quite some time. In fact, I have a blog post from a few years back which goes over some of the solutions customers have implemented, the majority use case being Virtualizing MacOS on ESXi for iOS/MacOS development. These solutions were usually not cheap and involved a sizable amount of infrastructure (e.g. storage arrays, network switches, etc) but worked very well for large vSphere/MacOS based environments.

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Instant Clone Apple MacOS

03.28.2019 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Whether you are a brand new startup working on the next hot mobile app or an established Enterprise or Consumer brand company, development and testing of Apple iOS and/or MacOS is simply a reality in todays world. The vast majority of these customers accomplish this by running Apple MacOS on vSphere, either within their own on-premises datacenter or leveraging MacStadium, the largest MacOS Cloud hosting provider, who also runs their Mac infrastructure using VMware vSphere.

The ability to quickly build/test and deploy your application (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) can mean the difference of having an edge over you competitor or being able to keep up with the demands of your business. Many customers have benefited from using vSphere platform and with technologies like Linked Clones, which allows you to quickly spin up a new VM without having to perform a complete full clone, it means you can build and test your application even faster.

In vSphere 6.7, we introduced a major enhancement to Instant Clone, which you can read more about here and here. One of the questions I have been seeing lately is whether Instant Clone can be applied to MacOS guests? The answer is absolutely! In fact, Matt Moriarity, who works for TravisCI, recently shared some tidbits on how to get a MacOS Mojave guests to see the updated MAC Address to ensure that there are no network conflicts when performing an Instant Clone.

The majority of the "hard" work to use Instant Clone is really from within the GuestOS and the customization script that needs to be developed. In fact, Instant Clone is pretty OS agnostics and you can even Instant Clone Microsoft Windows 98 and 2000, if you really wanted to 😀

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Automating Cross vCenter vMotion (xVC-vMotion) between the same & different SSO Domain

05.26.2016 by William Lam // 79 Comments

In the last couple of months, I have noticed an increase in customer interests in using the Cross vCenter vMotion (xVC-vMotion) capability that was introduced back in vSphere 6.0. In my opinion, I still think this is probably one of the coolest features of that release. There is no longer the limitation of restricting your Virtual Machine mobility from within a single vCenter Server, but you can now live migrate a running VM across different vCenter Servers.

The primary method to start a xVC-vMotion is by using the vSphere Web Client which requires your vCenter Servers Servers to be part of the same SSO Domain and will automatically enable the new Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) feature. ELM allows you to easily manage and view all of your vCenter Servers from within the vSphere Web Client as shown in the example screenshot below.

However, the vSphere Web Client is not the only way to start a xVC-vMotion, you can also automate it through the use of the vSphere API. In fact, there is even an "Extended" capability of xVC-vMotion that is not very well known which I have written about here which allows to live migrate a running VM across two different vCenter Servers that are NOT part of the same SSO Domain. This Extended xVC-vMotion (unofficially I am calling it ExVC-vMotion) is only available when using the vSphere API as the vSphere Web Client is unable to display vCenter Servers that are part of another SSO Domain. Below is a quick diagram to help illustrate the point in which VM1 can be seamlessly migrated between different vCenter Servers from within the same SSO Domain as well as between different vCenter Servers that are not part of the same SSO Domain.

Note: For additional details and requirements for Cross vCenter vMotion, please have a look at this VMware KB 210695 and this blog post here for more information.

UPDATE (06/15/17) - I have added a few minor enhancements to the script to support migrating a VM given a vSphere Resource Pool which enables the ability to migrate to and from VMware's upcoming VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). There is also an additional UppercaseUUID parameter which seems to be required for some xVC-vMotions where the vCenter Server's InstanceUUID must be provided as all upper case or the operation will fail. I have still not identified why this is needed for some migrations, but for now there is a nice flag that can be used to enable this if you are hitting this problem.

UPDATE (04/08/17) - In vSphere 6.0 Update 2, there is a known limitation which prevents a VM that has multiple VMDKs stored across different datastores to be xVC-vMotion (compute only) using the vSphere Web Client. This limitation no longer exists in vSphere 6.0 Update 3 but does require customers to upgrade. If you need to perform a compute-only xVC-vMotion where the VM has multiple VMDKs across different datastores, the vSphere APIs does not have this limitation and you do not necessary need to upgrade to be able to perform this operation. Huge thanks to Askar Kopayev who discovered this and also submitted an enhancement to my xMove-VM PowerCLI script to support this functionality.

Given the amount of interest recently and some of the feedback on my original ExVC-vMotion script which I had written about here, I figured it was time to refactor my code so that it could easily support both ExVC-vMotion as well as standard xVC-vMotion. In addition, I have also added support for migrating to and from a Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS), where as previously the example only supported Virtual Standard Switch (VSS). Lastly, the script now also supports migrating a VM that is configured with multiple vNICs.

The new script is now called xMove-VM.ps1 and is even more simpler than my original script. You will need to edit the script and update the following variables:

Variable	Description
vmname	Name of the VM to migrate
sourceVC	The hostname or IP Address of the source vCenter Server in which the VM currently resides in
sourceVCUsername	Username to the Source vCenter Server
sourceVCPassword	Password to the Source vCenter Server
destVC	The hostname or IP Address of the Destination vCenter Server in which to migrate the VM to
destVCUsername	Username to the Destination vCenter Server
destVCpassword	Password to the Destination vCenter server
datastore	Name of the vSphere Datastore to migrate the VM to
cluster	Name of the vSphere Cluster to migrate the VM to
resourcepool	Name of the vSphere Resource Pool to migrate the VM to
vmhost	Name of the ESXi host to migrate the VM to
vmnetworks	Name of the vSphere Network(s). in the order in of the vNIC interfaces to migrate the VM to
switch	Name of the vSphere Switch to migrate the VM to that is comma separated and ordered by vNIC
switchtype	The type of vSphere Switch (vss or vds)
xvctype	Whether this is a Compute-only Cross VC-vMotion (1=true or 0 = false)
UppercaseUUID	There cases where the vCenter Server InstanceUUID must be all caps ($true or $false)

Here is a screenshot of running the script:

Note: When changing the type of vSphere Switch, the following combinations will are supported by the script as well as using the vSphere Web Client: VDS to VDS, VSS to VSS and VSS to VDS. VDS to VSS is not supported using the UI or API and neither are 3rd party switches supported.

Here are some additional xVC-vMotion and vMotion articles that may also useful to be aware of: