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How to bootstrap vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) on unsupported hardware?

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I was recently chatting with a fellow colleague who asked an interesting question about the memory overhead between running vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) versus the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) from a VMware Homelab perspective. I honestly did not know the answer as I am only using vSAN OSA for my personal homelab. I was curious myself, especially its implicationn on small form factor (SFF) systems which typically max at out 64GB of memory.

Today, vSAN ESA is only officially supported when using vSAN ESA Ready Nodes which are all listed in the vSAN ESA HCL and the minimum amount of memory is 512GB. For the best possible experience and supported configurations, customers should only use approved vSAN ESA hardware and the use of any other systems will not yield the same benefits nor outcomes. As an aside, a fantastic resource for all things vSAN ESA can be found on the vSAN ESA TechZone page, which I highly recommend bookmarking as there is a lot of in-depth technical resources and collateral.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and is purely for educational purposes, use at your own risk.

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Nested ESXi installation using HTTPS boot over VirtualEFI in vSphere 8

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In vSphere 7.0 Update 2, an enhancement was made to the Virtual Machine's UEFI firmware called VirtualEFI that would enable ESXi to run in a VM (Nested ESXi) and perform an HTTP Boot given the ESXi bootloader URL without requiring any traditional PXE infrastructure.

This was especially useful for anyone testing or developing ESXi automation for use with ESXi Kickstart, where you can quickly prototype your automation without additional infrastructure dependencies and once the automation has been vetted, you can then leverage that exact same automation in your physical ESXi provisioning infrastructure.

The original solution had only supported HTTP and I recently came to learn that we can now also support HTTPS in vSphere 8!

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ACPI motherboard layout requires EFI - Considerations for switching VM firmware in vSphere 8 

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One of the important settings to consider when creating a new Virtual Machine in vSphere is the VM firmware, which can either be BIOS or EFI and can be configured under VM Options->Boot Options->Firmware. After selecting the desired guest operating system (GOS) in vSphere, the system will default to a recommended firmware type and can also be overridden by the user. Ultimately, the selection of the VM firmware should be determined by what your GOS supports.

If you ever need to change the VM firmware, you typically will need to re-install the GOS because it does not understand the new firmware change (just like in a physical server) and more than likely the GOS will also not boot due to this change and this is the existing behavior from GOS point of view.

For a net new VM creation, prior to vSphere 8, if you had configured a VM using EFI firmware and you have not installed a GOS and realized that you had made a mistake and needed to change the VM firmware to BIOS, you could easily do so using the vSphere UI or API and then install your OS. In vSphere 8 and specifically when using the latest Virtual Machine Compatibility (vHW20), you can not just switch the VM firmware after the initial VM creation, especially if you had started with EFI firmware and wish to change it to BIOS.

In doing so, you will come across the following error message:

ACPI motherboard layout requires EFI. Failed to start the virtual machine. Module DevicePowerOnEarly power on failed.

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