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Quick Tip - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Bringup fails without persistent ESX-OSData

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You will never run into this problem if you follow current recommended practices to install the ESX-OSData volume on a persistent storage device that could either be dedicated and/or co-located your ESXi installation.

For those deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab environment, you might attempt to reserve the limited number of storage devices for use with vSAN and decide to install ESXi on a USB device, which is perfectly fine but if you do not select a persistent storage device for the ESX-OSData volume, then it will default to use the ESXi ramdisk.

I recently observed that if you have such a configuration, the VCF Cloud Builder Bringup process will fail after attempting (three times) to re-deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).


As you can see from the screenshot above,  VCF Cloud Builder UI does not provide any details and ask users to look at the vCenter Server installation logs.

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Custom ESXi "Dummy" Reboot VIB for vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)

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A few weeks back, I had a request from one of our Technical Adoption Managers (TAM) that their customer wanted to create a custom ESXi VIB that could be used with vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) and would only require the ESXi host to reboot as part of the remediation.

This might sound like a strange request but I suspect the customer was either building out some automation for vLCM or simply getting more hands on with vLCM without applying any changes, which is great because its predecessor, vSphere Update Manager (VUM) will be removed in a future major release of vSphere.

While the customer was able to create a custom VIB by following the instructions in my recent blog post for building a custom VIB for ESXi 8.x, I did noticed that their descriptor.xml did not properly set the live-install-allowed and live-remove-allowed options which controls whether an ESXi host should reboot after installing and removing a VIB from the host respectively.


Since vLCM only works with offline bundles, we actually need to create an offline bundle with our custom ESXi VIB that vLCM can import. To further complicate things, starting with vSphere 7.x, a proper offline bundle that can be imported into vLCM requires the use of components rather than bulletins, which is what VUM previously had used.

With the assistance of the vLCM Engineering team, I was able to create my own "Dummy" ESXi VIB/Offline Bundle that is compatible with both vSphere 7.x and 8.x, which can be used directly by a standalone ESXi host via ESXCLI or imported and lifecycle using vLCM.

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Retrieving detailed vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) Image information from vSphere Cluster using PowerCLI

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As more and more users are adopting vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) to simplify the lifecycle and configuration management of their ESXi hosts, you may want to get more information about a given vLCM image that has been associated with a specific vSphere Cluster.

While you can certainly get this information using the vSphere UI, you can also get this detailed information by using the vLCM REST API, which can easily be consumed using variety of vSphere SDK Clients including PowerCLI.

For inventory and/or auditing purposes, automation is typically the answer, especially at scale. I will not bore you with the details, but I recently created the following PowerCLI function called Get-vLCMClusterImageInformation and given the name of a vLCM-enabled vSphere Cluster, it will provide you with the associated ESXi base image and all Solutions and Components that is associated with a given image.

UPDATE (02/06/25) - The script has also been updated to also include information for a vLCM image that has integrated with an Hardware Support Manager (HSM) to provide firmware information.

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