Happy to share that our popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling has now been updated to v1.8 which primarily adds support for ESXi 7.0 Update 2!
This release also resolves a recent PSOD issue that a few folks in the community were hitting when using multiple USB NICs. For more details, please see the change log for more information.
I recently saw a question asking about the character limit for the various vSphere Inventory Objects like a Datacenter or Virtual Machine as an example. I was not aware of anything formally documented, but I did come across this 2018 blog post by fellow colleague Todd Simmons, who did some testing with vSphere 6.7 and shared his initial results.
I was curious myself on whether these limits have changed but I also noticed there were many other vSphere Objects that were not tested. I figured this would be an interesting exercise to re-evaluate against the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release and using some PowerShell code like the following to help:
$str = "w" * 80
Below are my findings which have been verified using the vSphere UI and I have also expanded the object list to cover more recent solutions such as vSphere with Tanzu.
After spending a few days playing with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) APIs, I am happy to share my latest automation lab deployment script for deploying vSphere with Tanzu using the new NSX ALB which was introduced with the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release.
🙌 BOOM!!!
Fully Automated vSphere with @VMwareTanzu using the new @vmwarensx Advanced Load Balancer introduced in vSphere 7.0 Update 2 Lab Deployment in just 32 minutes! 🔥
Still need to clean up some things, but this beats clicking around the UI! My 🤲 thanks me pic.twitter.com/hN32Qk3oDc
— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) March 29, 2021
You can find the new automation script along with all the details at the following Github Repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-nsx-advanced-lb-automated-lab-deployment#enable-workload-management
In my environment, it took about ~32 minutes for the deployment to finish, but YMMV based on the performance of your underlying hardware.
In addition to the automated lab deployment script above, I have also updated my community VMware.WorkloadManagement module to add support for enabling Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster using NSX ALB. This is introduced as a new function creatively called New-WorkloadManagement3. You use the Get-Help cmdlet to get a list of supported arguments or you can take a look at this example.
