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Quick Tip - Automating cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic configuration for ESXi Kickstart with USB

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To prevent ESXi from PSOD'ing when an Intel Hybrid Consumer CPU is detected with non-uniform capabilities, a workaround can be applied to ignore the uniformity miss-match which is needed before the ESXi installer fully boots up and also after the initial reboot.

For those looking to fully automate this process using ESXi Kickstart using USB as an example, there are two places where the kernel boot option must be added:

1) The first is the EFI\boot\boot.cfg file on the ESXi installer media (e.g. USB) where you will append to the kernelopt line as shown in the snippet below:

bootstate=0
title=Loading ESXi installer
timeout=5
prefix=
kernel=/b.b00
kernelopt=ks=usb:/KS.CFG cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic=FALSE
.....

2) The second must be added to the %post section of your ESXi kickstart, which will update the first ESXi bootbank's boot.cfg and ensure the kernel option is passed to ESXi when it reboots after installation:

%post --interpreter=busybox

sed -i '/^kernelopt=/ s/$/ cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic=FALSE/' /vmfs/volumes/BOOTBANK1/boot.cfg

Disable IPv6 in ESXi Kickstart without additional reboot

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ESXi supports dual stack networking (IPv4 and IPv6) by default, however users can also configure just IPv4 or IPv6, which requires a system reboot for the changes to go into effect.

Recently, I received a question from a colleague asking if there was a way to disable IPv6 during ESXi Kickstart (aka scripted installation) but NOT require an additional reboot as this setting is typically added in the %post or %firstboot section, which will require an additional reboot due to changing the networking stack default.

The solution was actually quite simple by just leveraging the %pre section, which would ensure that IPv6 is disabled upon the initial reboot after the ESXi installation.

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Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) host commission using ESXi Kickstart

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ESXi Scripted Installation (Kickstart) has been my go-to method for achieving zero-touch provisioning of ESXi hosts at scale, which I had started using back in the ESX 2.5 days when I was a customer! Having worked at some very larger enterprises, I got the opportunity to experience and manage a variety of environments for automated ESXi provisioning.

For more than a decade, I have written hundreds of articles about ESXi kickstart and how it can help solve a variety of use cases stemming from my own background to some of the unique requirements that have come up from some of our largest VMware customers. To date, some of my favorite ESXi kickstart solutions includes my 2014 blog post in automating VM deployments using a USB device which became the basis for my USB to SDDC project in 2017.

While playing with the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1 Holodeck release (currently in Beta), I was thinking about the current VCF host commissioning workflow, which is a multi-step process after an ESXi host has been provisioned where you need to manually (or using automation) to add the hosts to SDDC Manager before they can be consumed for either expanding and/or deploying a new workload domain.

I thought, why could we not just skip this step all together and that was when I had the idea of just incorporating the VCF host commissioning workflow automatically as part of an ESXi Kickstart installation! 😀

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