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Quick Tip - Disable network traffic monitoring (promiscuous) UI prompt in VMware Fusion

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While working on some demos planned for my VMware Explore session, Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation At Scale [CODEB1574LV], I kept getting this network monitoring prompt when powering up my Nested ESXi VM running in VMware Fusion.


Since Nested ESXi requires the use of promiscuous mode (for inner-VM networking), you will be prompted to approve of the request or networking will be disabled. For demo purposes, you probably do not want this prompting and I was wondering if this could be disabled. After a quick ping in our internal VMware Hosted Google Space, I learned that we can disable the UI prompt by adding a VMX option to the VM.

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Incorrect guestOS type for Nested ESXi causes vCLS issues with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Holodeck Toolkit

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Several months back, I started noticing an increase number of folks reporting problems powering on their vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) VM when using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Holodeck Toolkit solution and the following workaround can be applied, which came directly from the Holodeck developers.

While a workaround exists including vCLS script located at C:\VLC\VLC-Holo-Site-1\vclsfix, it was very puzzling because this seems to only happen with the Nested ESXi VMs and the VCF Holodeck Toolkit and it was NOT observed when deploying a regular Nested ESXi environment, but I never took a closer look to see why that might be.

A few weeks back, I recieved an email from Mike Foley (former vSphere HA and vCLS PM), I came to learn the reason folks using the VCF Holodeck Toolkit was seeing this problem and it was specific to that solution due to how the guestOS was configured for the Nested ESXi VMs.

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Using Nested ESXi for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Workload Domain fails with vSAN ESA Auto Disk Claim 

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As of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.0, you can now use the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) when deploying a VCF Workload Domain where as in earlier releases, only the vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) was supported, which is typically what I deploy for testing purposes.

While working on some enhancements to my VCF Automated Lab Deployment Script, I needed to go through a VCF Workload Domain deployment using vSAN ESA but I kept running into the following error within SDDC Manager: Perform vSAN ESA Auto Disk Claim


Based on the error message, I had assumed there was an issue with claiming the SSD on the Nested ESXi VM for vSAN ESA but when I logged into the VCF Workload Domain vCenter Server, I was able to claim the devices without any issues. Looking at the SDDC Manager logs /var/log/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/domainmanager.log also did not yield anything useful:

2024-05-27T12:43:44.545+0000 ERROR [vcf_dm,66548000bff276b81889b17ab22d34ed,2f33] [c.v.v.c.f.p.a.i.ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction,dm-exec-14] Host host-16 does not contribute to the vSAN ESA storage. 2024-05-27T12:43:44.598+0000 ERROR [vcf_dm,66548000bff276b81889b17ab22d34ed,2f33] [c.v.v.c.f.p.a.i.ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction,dm-exec-14] Host host-19 does not contribute to the vSAN ESA storage. 2024-05-27T12:43:44.650+0000 ERROR [vcf_dm,66548000bff276b81889b17ab22d34ed,2f33] [c.v.v.c.f.p.a.i.ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction,dm-exec-14] Host host-20 does not contribute to the vSAN ESA storage. 2024-05-27T12:43:44.701+0000 ERROR [vcf_dm,66548000bff276b81889b17ab22d34ed,2f33] [c.v.v.c.f.p.a.i.ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction,dm-exec-14] Host host-21 does not contribute to the vSAN ESA storage. 2024-05-27T12:43:44.702+0000 DEBUG [vcf_dm,66548000bff276b81889b17ab22d34ed,2f33] [c.v.e.s.c.c.v.vsphere.VsphereClient,dm-exec-14] Destroying 2 open views 2024-05-27T12:43:44.722+0000 ERROR [vcf_dm,66548000bff276b81889b17ab22d34ed,2f33] [c.v.v.c.f.p.a.i.ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction,dm-exec-14] Failed to verify storage pool disks for cluster wld-w01-cl01 2024-05-27T12:43:44.723+0000 ERROR [vcf_dm,66548000bff276b81889b17ab22d34ed,2f33] [c.v.v.c.f.p.a.i.ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction,dm-exec-14] com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.exceptions.OrchTaskException: Found host(s) in clust er wld-w01-cl01 without contributing to storage pool. 2024-05-27T12:43:44.723+0000 ERROR [vcf_dm,66548000bff276b81889b17ab22d34ed,2f33] [c.v.e.s.o.model.error.ErrorFactory,dm-exec-14] [A337BL] VSPHERE_AUTO_DISK_CLAIM_FAILED Failed to enable auto claim on cluster wld-w01-cl01 com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.exceptions.OrchTaskException: Failed to enable auto claim on cluster wld-w01-cl01 at com.vmware.vcf.common.fsm.plugins.action.impl.ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction.postValidate(ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction.java:119) at com.vmware.vcf.common.fsm.plugins.action.impl.ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction.postValidate(ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction.java:23) at com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.platform.action.FsmActionState.lambda$static$1(FsmActionState.java:23) at com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.platform.action.FsmActionState.invoke(FsmActionState.java:62) at com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.platform.action.FsmActionPlugin.invoke(FsmActionPlugin.java:159) at com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.platform.action.FsmActionPlugin.invoke(FsmActionPlugin.java:144) at com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.core.ProcessingTaskSubscriber.invokeMethod(ProcessingTaskSubscriber.java:400) at com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.core.ProcessingTaskSubscriber.processTask(ProcessingTaskSubscriber.java:561) at com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.core.ProcessingTaskSubscriber.accept(ProcessingTaskSubscriber.java:124) at jdk.internal.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor397.invoke(Unknown Source) at java.base/jdk.internal.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.base/java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:568) at com.google.common.eventbus.Subscriber.invokeSubscriberMethod(Subscriber.java:85) at com.google.common.eventbus.Subscriber.lambda$dispatchEvent$0(Subscriber.java:71) at com.vmware.vcf.common.tracing.TraceRunnable.run(TraceRunnable.java:59) at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1136) at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:635) at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:833) Caused by: com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.exceptions.OrchTaskException: Found host(s) in cluster wld-w01-cl01 without contributing to storage pool. at com.vmware.vcf.common.fsm.plugins.action.impl.ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction.postValidate(ClaimDisksForVsanEsaClusterAction.java:113) ... 17 common frames omitted

After a bit of digging, I was wondering if this was related to a similiar issue that is seen during the VCF Bringup of the VCF Management Domain using vSAN ESA where a custom vSAN HCL JSON was required?

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