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Automated vSphere & vSAN 8 Lab Deployment Script

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Continuing with the tradition of a new vSphere release, I have also released an update to my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance to support the latest vSphere 8 release.

I know many of you are excited to get hands on experience with vSphere 8 and start exploring some of the new features and capabilities. To make it even easier to deploy, I have created an updated version of my vSphere and vSAN Lab Deployment script which you can find on my Github repo: Automated vSphere & vSAN 8 Lab Deployment Github Repo

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Updates to Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance for vSphere 7.0 Update 3

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vSphere 7.0 Update 3 officially GA'ed this morning and I am happy to share a quick that my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance (OVA and Content Library) has also been updated to support the latest release. In addition, I have also published an update to the ESXi 7.0 Update 2a Virtual Appliance as there was an issue that prevented it from working with the latest VMware Cloud Foundation 4.x release.

Nested ESXi OVA:

Nested ESXi Content Library:

For prior ESXi versions, you can check out http://vmwa.re/nestedesxi

Simplified Nested ESXi installation in ESXi 7.0 Update 2 using HTTP Boot over VirtualEFI

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Deploying an ESXi scripted installation aka Kickstart running within a VM (Nested ESXi) has a number of benefits, especially for testing and development purposes. This was something I did regularly as a customer, especially with new releases of ESXi to ensure our existing automation scripts and processes continued to work before rolling out into production. ESXi kickstart itself is pretty straight forward, but the required supporting infrastructure (PXE Server, DHCP, TFTP, etc) that needs to be configured, especially for a greenfield deployment can often be challenging for new comers.

Even with an existing PXE infrastructure, it can often be difficult to configure or troubleshoot depending on your level of access which does not add any value in actually testing or automating the ESXi scripted installation process. In ESXi 7.0 Update 2, an enhancement was made to the Virtual Machine's UEFI firmware called VirtualEFI that would enable ESXi to perform an HTTP Boot given the ESXi bootloader URL and without requiring any of the traditional PXE infrastructure.

To take advantage of this new capability, you just need to have a physical server running ESXi 7.0 Update 2 and a VM that is configured with the latest vHW19 compatibility. To configure HTTP boot, you will need to add the following two VM Advanced Settings:

  • networkBootProtocol - httpv4 or httpv6
  • networkBootUri - HTTP URL to the ESXi bootloader (bootx64.efi)

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware

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