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Windows Server 2012 fix is out for the VCS to VCSA Migration Fling!

01.05.2016 by William Lam //

Happy New Years everyone! Here is the first post of 2016 🙂

I know many of you have been anxiously waiting for a fix to the Winexe bug that causes the VCS to VCSA Migration Fling to fail when migrating from a vCenter Server that runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (includes R2) OS to the VCSA. It has taken a bit longer than we all had hoped due to legal reviews and such, but today I am please to announce that we now have an updated release to the VCS to VCSA Migration appliance (v0.9.1). For customers using Windows Server 2012, WinRM will be used instead of Winexe due to the Windows bug that has been identified and will require a couple of additional configurations on the source Windows vCenter Server prior to starting the migration process. For more details, please refer to the documentation on the Fling site. Customers using Windows Server 2008, Winexe will continue to work as it does today.

In addition to this fix, we also now support specifying a custom port for the Microsoft SQL Server Database in case you had changed it from the default of 1433, which a few customers have asked for.

migration-applipance-0.9.1
I would like to give a big thanks to both Mike and Ravi for working tirelessly on getting this fix out as soon as they could along with all the legal hurdles. Let us know if you have any feedback by either leaving a comment below or better yet, interact with the Engineers by leaving a comment on the Fling site!

Categories // VCSA, vSphere 5.5 Tags // Fling, migrate2vcsa, migration, vcenter server appliance, VCSA, vcva

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

12.21.2015 by William Lam // 13 Comments

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.

updating-esxi-using-EHC-v4-3
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.

updating-esxi-using-EHC-v4-2
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.

updating-esxi-using-EHC-v4-5
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

Categories // ESXi Tags // embedded host client, ESXi, Fling, offline bundle, upgrade

Neat way of installing or updating any VIB using just the ESXi Embedded Host Client

11.10.2015 by William Lam // 5 Comments

A couple of months back I had tossed out an idea on Twitter asking if others would like to see an automatic update mechanism built into the ESXi Embedded Host Client which would allow users to easily update to newer releases of the Fling versus the current method which requires copying the VIB and then running command in the ESXi Shell.

Wonder if its just me,but would others like to see an automatic update mechanism in the ESXi Embedded Host Client UI? pic.twitter.com/R9KFMOE4zu

— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) August 26, 2015

To no surprise, the feedback was an astounding yes! Literally within a couple of hours, Etienne Le Sueur, one of the two VMware Engineers working on the Fling shared a screenshot that demonstrated that this would possible. The first release of this feature would simply ask for the URL to the updated ESXi Embedded Host Client VIB and this was included in the v3 release of the Fling.

One additional tidbit that Etienne had shared was that the way this feature was implemented, it was not only limited to Embedded Host Client VIB but you could do this for any ESXi VIB. This is done by using the vSphere API and calling into the InstallHostPatchV2_Task() method which allows you to install or update an ESXi VIB from a URL source. Most recently, there a twitter conversation between myself, Etienne and Christian Mohn on how this capability could be further extended to include updating ESXi itself which can either be from an Image Profile or offline bundle. For those with a detailed eye, you may have noticed that the same API method can also support an offline bundle URL which would make this possible. As of right now, the feature is actually included in an internal build of the Embedded Host Client, but perhaps we will see this in a future update of the Embedded Host Client? 😉

Going back to the original topic of this blog post, to use the VIB install/update mechanism, you would need to first upload the ESXi VIB to an HTTP Server and then specify the URL. This is fine if you have an existing HTTP Server but if you do not, it is sort of a pain and though there are other methods like uploading directly to the ESXi's python based HTTP Server as mentioned by Christian, it would still require using something like SCP which is an additional step. My initial goal and hope was to be able to install or update an ESXi VIB or ESXi itself using purely the Embedded Host Client. This would keep things simple and not require things like SSH to be enabled on the ESXi host.

After a bit of brainstorming with Etienne, he actually found a super clever way of accomplishing this after our conversation. The idea I had was to make use of the ESXi Datastore to store the VIB which can be uploaded through the Embedded Host Client. By default, there is also an HTTP based interface to the datastore, however it requires authentication which would be a problem. The neat idea that was suggested was why not try to specify the local VMFS path to the ESXi VIB (e.g./vmfs/volumes/datastore1/my.vib)? It turns out that this actually works as well!

With just two easy steps, you can now upload an ESXi VIB and then install/update all using just the Embedded Host Client with no additional dependencies

Step 1 - Navigate to the Datastore section in the Embedded Host Client and then upload the ESXi VIB that you wish to install or update.

install-or-updating-vib-using-embedded-host-client-1
Step 2 - To install/update the VIB, click on Help in the upper right hand corner of the Embedded Host Client and select the "Update" option. Specify the local VMFS path to ESXi VIB and then click on Update to apply.

Note: A reboot may be required after applying a new VIB. It will be your responsibility to shutdown the VMs and reboot the ESXi host for changes to go into effect if required.

install-or-updating-vib-using-embedded-host-client-0
At this point, you should also see a task kicked off applying the VIB. If there are any errors thrown, they will be displayed else you should see a successful task completion. For educational purposes, here is a quick screenshot of /var/log/esxupdate.log showing the VIB being applied, this can be used for further troubleshooting if required.

install-or-updating-vib-using-embedded-host-client-2
Hope you enjoyed this neat little trick and with just two easy steps you can install or update any ESXi VIB using the Embedded Host Client without additional dependencies or enabling SSH on the ESXi host.

Categories // ESXi Tags // embedded host client, ESXi, Fling, vib

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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