After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, I was looking forward to kicking the tires on the highly anticipated vSphere with Tanzu Virtual Machine Service capability. Both Oren Penso and Myles Gray have both done a fantastic job on their respective blogs here and here demo'ing the new VM Service.
While browsing through Oren's Github repo since I came across his blog post first, a couple of things quickly caught my attention. The first was a reference to OvfEnv transport with the YAML manifests and the second was that he was able to deploy an Ubuntu VM, which is interesting since only CentOS is currently officially supported. Why was this interesting? Well, with these two pieces of information, I had a pretty good theory on how the guest customizations were being passed into the GuestOS for configuration and this gave me an idea 🤔
I decided to put my hypothesis to the test and try out the VM Service and deploy one of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and as you can see from the tweet below, it worked! 🤯
😂😂😂😂😂
It freaking worked! Go @VMwareTanzu#NestedESXi pic.twitter.com/udTdwvLbgN
— William Lam (@lamw) May 4, 2021
Disclaimer: vSphere with Tanzu and the VM Service currently only officially supports CentOS images for deployment, other operating systems are currently not supported. This is primarily for educational and experimentation purposes only.