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Quick Tip - How to deploy vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) to legacy CPU without VMX Unrestricted Guest feature?

03.02.2023 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I recently had a customer reach out who was having an issue deploying the latest vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 8.x to an ESXi host that had a CPU that was no longer supported. After the VCSA OVA was uploaded by the VCSA (UI/CLI) installer, it fails to power on the VM with the following error message:

The Intel "VMX Unrestricted Guest" feature is necessary to run this virtual machine on an Intel processor

This problem is only observed with older legacy CPUs that do not support some of the modern CPU instructions that is expected by most workloads today. There is workaround for those that still wish to run on unsupported hardware, which may yield other unexpected behaviors, by adding a VM Advanced Setting monitor.allowLegacyCPU = TRUE

However, there is a chicken/egg problem that user was not able to add this setting before the VM was automatically powered on by the VCSA Installer.

[Read more...]

Categories // OVFTool, vSphere 8.0 Tags // ovftool, vcenter server appliance, vSphere 8.0

Quick Tip - Easily move or copy VMs between two Free ESXi hosts?

01.30.2023 by William Lam // 10 Comments

There are many options when it comes to moving or copying Virtual Machine(s) across two ESXi hosts that are fully licensed and can be managed by a vCenter Server, but what about standalone ESXi hosts that only use the Free ESXi Hypervisor license?

Luckily, we have a couple of native solutions from VMware that not only work, but they are completely free to use, which some folks may not even realize!

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // free esxi, ovftool, vCenter Converter

Quick Tip - Encoding special characters for OVFTool on the command-line

12.12.2022 by William Lam // 1 Comment

If you use strong and complex passwords that contain special characters (which you should), it can some times be challenging from an automation perspective on how to properly escape these characters, which can also depend on the scripting or programming language that you are using.

Today I learned about a nice little enhancement in OVFTool 4.4 or later, which makes it easy to handle complex passwords containing special characters by supporting URL encoding for these characters. This is also great for those writing automation scripts and not having to input the password interactively but can now be added to OVFTool command-line string.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, OVFTool Tags // ovftool

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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

  • VMware Flings is now available in Free Downloads of Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) 05/19/2025
  • VMUG Connect 2025 - Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x in a Box  05/15/2025
  • Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) 05/06/2025
  • Quick Tip - Validating Broadcom Download Token  05/01/2025
  • Supported chipsets for the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling 04/23/2025

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