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Upgrading ESXi itself is now possible with the new Embedded Host Client v4

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It looks like we just got an early Christmas gift from Etienne, George and the VMware Flings team with the release of v4 of the ESXi Embedded Host Client (EHC). One of the new features that I am most excited about is the ability to upgrade ESXi itself using the "Update" feature which was first introduced in EHC v3. In the previous release of EHC, you could install or patch any ESXi VIB using this interface which I had blogged about here. With the latest release, Etienne has expanded its functionality to not only allow for a VIB URL but also a metadata.zip URL which ESXi offline bundles contain.

Here is an example of using EHC v4 to upgrade an ESXi 6.0 host to ESXi 6.0 Update 1:

Step 1 - Download ESXi offline bundle of choice, in this example we are downloading the offline bundle for ESXi 6.0 Update 1:updating-esxi-using-EHC-v4-1

Step 2 - You will need to extract the contents of the offline bundle and then upload the content to either a vSphere Datastore or an HTTP accessible URL as shown in the screenshots below.

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Currently it is not possible to upload an entire directory using the Datastore Browser with EHC. This is something I have reported internally and hopefully will be fixed in a future update.

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Step 3 - Click on the "Help" menu on the upper right hand corner of the Embedded Host Client and select the "Update" option which should prompt you to specify a URL. You can either specify a local datastore path to the metadata.zip such as the following:

/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi600-201510001/metadata.zip

or you can specify an HTTP(s) URL to the metadata.zip like the following:

http://192.168.1.180/ESXi600-201510001/metadata.zip

updating-esxi-using-EHC-v4-4
Step 4 - Once you click the "Update" button, you will be asked to confirm and then you should see task kicked off called "Install Host Patch V2". Once the task has completed, you will need to reboot the ESXi host for the changes to take effect. If you are interested in viewing the update logs without having to log in via SSH, you can click on the "Monitor" tab of the Host option and under "Logs", click on /var/log/esxupdate.log to see the progress.

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If you have more than one or two hosts, I definitely recommend uploading the extracted offline bundle onto a webserver or a shared vSphere Datastore which you can the access from multiple ESXi hosts. This is a very nice way to easily upgrade your ESXi hosts without having to go into the ESXi Shell or enable SSH. Pretty neat feature if you ask me! There are many other new enhancements included in this release, be sure to give them a try and let us know if you have any feedback by leaving a comment on my blog or better yet, directly on the Fling site.

What's new in Embedded Host Client v4

  • Host
    • Ability to change host acceptance level
    • Ability to edit lock down exception users
    • Ability to edit system swap settings
  • VM
    • VM list has been optimized for performance, reducing data download by a factor of 5.
    • Ability to edit VM advance options
    • Ability to edit VM video adapter settings
    • Add a PCI pass through device (unable to remove device though)
    • SRIOV support for Network card devices
    • Ability to change browser console keyboard layout (Japanese and German are the currently supported layouts)
    • Cmd+a or Ctrl+a to select all VMs in list
    • Soft-power off and reset if Tools is installed is now supported
  • General
    • New Tools and links menu under Help
    • Update mechanism can now take a URL or data store path to an metadata zipfile, allowing to update ESXi itself
    • Localization and internationalization (French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Chinese (traditional and simplified) and Korean
    • Ability to disable session timeout
    • A huge number of bugfixes and minor improvements

Deploying Nested ESXi is even easier now with the ESXi Virtual Appliance

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Several months back I had built an ESXi Virtual Appliance that allows anyone to quickly stand up a fully functional Nested ESXi VM which includes guest customization such as networking, NTP, syslog, passwords, etc. The virtual appliance was initially built for my own personal use as I found myself constantly rebuilding my lab environment for evaluating and breaking new VMware software. I figured if this was useful for myself, it probably could benefit others at VMware and I posted the details internally on our Socialcast forum. Since then, I have received numerous stories on how helpful the ESXi Virtual Appliance has been for both our Field and Engineering for setting up demos, POCs, evaluations, etc.

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Migrating ESXi to a Distributed Virtual Switch with a single NIC running vCenter Server

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Earlier this week I needed test something which required a VMware Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS) and this had to be a physical setup, so Nested ESXi was out of the question. I could have used my remote lab, but given what I was testing was a bit "experimental", I prefered using my home lab in the event I need direct console access. At home, I run ESXi on a single Apple Mac Mini and one of the challenges with this and other similar platforms (e.g. Intel NUC) is that they only have a single network interface. As you might have guessed, this is a problem when looking to migrate from a Virtual Standard Switch (VSS) to VDS, as it requires at least two NICS.

Unfortunately, I had no other choice and needed to find a solution. After a couple minutes of searching around the web, I stumbled across this serverfault thread here which provided a partial solution to my problem. In vSphere 5.1, we introduced a new feature which would automatically roll back a network configuration change if it negatively impacted network connectivity to your vCenter Server. This feature could be disabled temporarily by editing the vCenter Server Advanced Setting (config.vpxd.network.rollback) which would allow us to by-pass the single NIC issue, however this does not solve the problem entirely. What ends up happening is that the single pNIC is now associated with the VDS, but the VM portgroups are not migrated and the reason that this is problematic is that the vCenter Server is also running on the ESXi host which it is managing and has now lost network connectivity 🙂

I lost access to my vCenter Server and even though I could connect directly to the ESXi host, I was not able to change the VM Network to the Distributed Virtual Portgroup (DVPG). This is actually an expected behavior and there is an easy work around, let me explain. When you create a DVPG, there are three different bindings: Static, Dynamic, and Ephemeral that can be configured and by default, Static binding is used. Both Static and Dynamic DVPGs can only be managed through vCenter Server and because of this, you can not change the VM network to a non-Ephemeral DVPG and in fact, it is not even listed  when connecting to the vSphere C# Client. The simple work around is to create a DVPG using the Ephemeral binding and this will allow you to then change the VM network of your vCenter Server and is the last piece to solving this puzzle.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

Here are the exact steps to take if you wish to migrate an ESXi host with a single NIC from a VSS to VDS and running vCenter Server:

Step 1 - Change the following vCenter Server Advanced Setting config.vpxd.network.rollback to false:

migrating-from-vss-to-vds-with-single-nic-1
Note: Remember to re-enable this feature once you have completed the migration

Step 2 - Create a new VDS and the associated Portgroups for both your VMkernel interfaces and VM Networks. For the DVPG which will be used for the vCenter Server's VM network, be sure to change the binding to Ephemeral before proceeding with the VDS migration.

migrating-from-vss-to-vds-with-single-nic-0
Step 3 - Proceed with the normal VDS Migration wizard using the vSphere Web/C# Client and ensure that you perform the correct mappings. Once completed, you should now be able connect directly to the ESXi host using either the vSphere C# Client or ESXi Embedded Host Client to confirm that the VDS migration was successful as seen in the screenshot below.

migrating-from-vss-to-vds-with-single-nic-2
Note: If you forgot to perform Step 2 (which I initially did), you will need to login to the DCUI of your ESXi host and restore the networking configurations.

Step 4 - The last and final step is to change the VM network for your vCenter Server. In my case, I am using the VCSA and due to a bug I found in the Embedded Host Client, you will need to use the vSphere C# Client to perform this change if you are running VCSA 6.x. If you are running Windows VC or VCSA 5.x, then you can use the Embedded Host Client to modify the VM network to use the new DVPG.

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Once you have completed the VM reconfiguration you should now be able to login to your vCenter Server which is now connected to a DVPG running on a VDS which is backed by a single NIC on your ESXi host 😀

There is probably no good use case for this outside of home labs, but I was happy that I found a solution and hopefully this might come in handy for others who might be in a similar situation and would like to use and learn more about VMware VDS.