WilliamLam.com

Quick Tip - Enabling ESXi Coredumps to be stored on USB

by // Leave a Comment

I was recently working with Engineering to reproduce an issue which causes an ESXi PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) and I wanted the generated ESXi coredump to simply write to the USB device, which I could easily grab.

As of ESXi 7.x, I know we had removed a few of the old ESXi kernel boot options for allowing ESXi to store coredumps on a USB device and the using the ESXi kernel boot option allowCoreDumpOnUsb=TRUE should now be used, however I was struggling to get it to work.

Since I was using a debug version of ESXi, I needed to install ESXi from scratch and I thought I could simpply add the required kernel option, as shown in the screenshot below, and I had assumed it would automatically configure the ESXi coredump file to be stored on the VMFS-L volume residing on the USB device.


After a couple of attempts, I finally realized that this particular ESXi kernel boot option, is literally that, a boot option that is only applicable after the initial ESXi installation. 🤦 Unlike other ESXi kernel boot options which can be used during the initial installation which would apply certain configuration changes, this setting applies after ESXi has been installed. Once I appended the setting, the ESXi coredump file was created in the VMFS-L volume and I was then able to reproduce the issue and generate vm-support bundle that included the coredump!

Automated ESXi Installation with a USB Network Adapter using Kickstart

by // 2 Comments

I have been working with the Project Keswick team for quite some time now, which is an OCTO project is lead by my good friend Alan Renouf, who is doing some really innovative work with ESXi at the edge and application deployment using a desired state engine.

Recently I had met with the team to discuss some of the options for their automated deployment which uses the tried and true ESXi scripted installation aka ESXi Kickstart. One thing that I had shared was just how powerful the %pre section within the kickstart is and can be used to redefine or update the original kickstart based on your installation criteria. For example, you could pull down external configuration files and determine at runtime to decide how you want to configure your networking to even fully bootstrapping a local vSAN datastore and this would all happen prior to ESXi installer starting. I have used the %pre section numerous times as a customer and also demonstrated in my USB-to-SDDC project which has also been an inspiration for the Project Keswick team.

One very cool capability that Project Keswick is enabling is the integration of the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi and one challenge they had faced with automating an ESXi installation when only a USB network adapter was available is additional configuration that must be setup before the installer can begin. They shared their solution and thought this would be a good blog post topic, especially as I know many folks use the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi in their homelab and if you wish to automate the installation, the solution shared from the team could help.

[Read more...]

ESXi with Intel Arc 750 / 770 GPU

by // Leave a Comment

I recently had the opportunity to play with one of Intel's Arc 7 series discrete GPU (A750), which is part of the new Intel Arc desktop graphics product line, that was just released last Fall. While the primary audience for the Intel Arc graphics is for creators and desktop gaming, I was really interested in its applicability for a vSphere-based environment which also has a number of interesting use cases for graphics from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), video transcoding/rendering, AI/ML, Kubernetes, general purpose graphics acceleration and even basic gaming to name a few.

While there are many GPU options in the market for vSphere, depending on your needs and budget, the new Intel's new Arc 7 series could be a nice modern option as it is touted to be both price and performance competitive with other offerings within the market.

[Read more...]