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Easier method to simulate custom ESXi SMBIOS hardware strings

01.06.2025 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Happy 2025! πŸŽ‰ Here is a fun one to kick off the New Year ☺️

Last year, I demonstrated a method for customizing the SMBIOS hardware string using Nested ESXi, but the solution was not perfect and required hacking up a VM ROM file and it was also limited to using the BIOS firmware for your Nested ESXi VM as the behavior for EFI firmware was different.

I was doing some research towards the end of last year and I came across a much more elegant solution that works for both physical and virtual ESXi!

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, Nested Virtualization Tags // Nested ESXi, SMBIOS

ESXi-Arm V2 Easter Egg

11.12.2024 by William Lam // 5 Comments

A new version of the ESXi-Arm Fling (V2) was recently released and the major update to the ESXi-Arm V2 Fling is that it is now based on the latest ESXi 8.x codebase, which is currently 8.0 Update 3b. In my blog post, I had hinted there was a small easter egg 🐣 the Engineering team had included in the ESXi-Arm Fling update, which I did not know about until they had mentioned it!

Since no one has officially found the easter egg, I figured it might be time to break the silence and share as I think it can actually benefit some users based on their usage of ESXi, especially from a testing and/or learning perspective such as playing with the vSphere API as just one example.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi-Arm, Nested Virtualization Tags // Arm, fusion, Nested ESXi

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

07.23.2024 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more...]

Categories // Fusion, Nested Virtualization Tags // fusion, Nested ESXi, promiscuous mode

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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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Recent

  • Ultimate Lab Resource for VCF 9.0 06/25/2025
  • VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on ASUS NUC 15 Pro (Cyber Canyon) 06/25/2025
  • VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on Minisforum MS-A2 06/25/2025
  • VCF 9.0 Offline Depot using Synology 06/25/2025
  • Deploying VCF 9.0 on a single ESXi host? 06/24/2025

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