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vSphere Pods using VDS based Supervisor in vSphere with Tanzu?

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vSphere with Tanzu has received an exciting update with the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 1, which removes the restriction for requiring NSX-based networking to deploy Supervisor Services. This is really cool because customers with only a VDS based Supervisor can now also get the benefits of the various Supervisor Services that vSphere with Tanzu supports!


For those not aware, Supervisor Services are deployed as vSphere Pods, which is a super tiny VM that boots up a Photon OS kernel and is configured with just enough resources to run one or more Linux containers. In earlier releases of vSphere with Tanzu, vSphere Pods required an NSX based Supervisor, but with this restriction removed in vSphere 8.0 Update 1, it seems like deploying vSphere Pods should also be possible with just a VDS based Supervisor? 🤔

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USB Network Native Driver Fling for ESXi 8.0 Update 1

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Songtao and I are happy to share that we now have a compatible version of the USB Network Native Driver for ESX v1.12 Fling that supports the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release! 🥳

This release also includes a couple of minor enhancement and fixes which are listed below:

  • Support for new DLINK RTL8156 device (0x2001:0xb301)
  • Updated maximum supported USB Network devices from 8 to 12
  • Resolved 2.5GbE link speed issue for RTL8156 adapter

Additionally, while ESXi 8.0 Update 1 has just been released, we know that not everyone will be on the latest version and these enhancement and fixes have also been ported to a version of USB Network Native Driver for ESX v1.12 Fling driver to also support ESXi 8.0, 8.0a, 8.0b, etc.

Use the following ESXi Component ZIP files based on your desired version of ESXi 8.x:

  • ESXi 8.0 - ESXi800-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-64098182-component-21668107.zip
  • ESXi 8.0 Update 1 - ESXi80U1-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-64098092-component-21669994.zip

Note: There are no plans to backport these enhancements/fixes to prior ESXi releases

Finally, if you are looking to create a custom ESXi ISO or Image Profile AND you either have an existing or can deploy a vCenter Server, please refer to this blog post for using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) via the UI or PowerCLI to create your custom images.


If you do NOT have or can not deploy a vCenter Server (no hosts required), then you can refer to this blog post for using PowerCLI Image Builder to create your custom images, but make sure you update Python dependency to at least 3.7.9+ or you will run into this issue.

ESXi configstorecli enhancement in vSphere 8.0 Update 1

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The ESXi configstorecli was introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and provides access to the ESXi ConfigStore which responsible for centrally managing all configurations for an ESXi host instead of relying on different methods including a variety of configuration files, I highly recommend reviewing this refresher article HERE if you have not heard of the configstorecli before. The ESXi ConfigStore is also the underlying infrastructure that powers the new vSphere Configuration Profile feature which is also part of the vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) solution.

For those who currently or plan to automate ESXi installations using Kickstart, I wrote an article HERE last year on how to start converting some of your existing automation into using the new ESXi configstorecli, which is another article I recommend folks take a look if you have no already.

One of the challenges that I personally found when using configstorecli was purely figuring out the overall schema for the different components, groups and keys that are available. While I have demonstrated how to traverse the configstore in this blog post HERE, I still found experience less than ideal. I would have liked a bit more of an iterative exploration of the configstore itself and rather than showing the entire schema, I could slowly expect each node as configstore is a stored as a JSON document.

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