I've published a new tool that allows you to quickly compare the list of supported product versions for VMware products. The tool's goal is to make the upgrade process easier. You no longer have to manually check the Interop Matrix for compatible product versions.
Please do not hesitate to comment when there are any questions, or you've encountered an error with the new tool.
How does it work?
When you are running an ESXi based homelab, you might have considered using vSAN as the storage technology of choice. Hyperconverged storages are a growing alternative to SAN-based systems in virtual environments, so using them at home will help to improve your skillset with that technology.
To get started with vSAN you need at least 3 ESXi Hosts, each equipped with 2 drives. Alternatively, you can build a 2-node vSAN Cluster using a Raspberry Pi as a witness node.
VMware maintains a special HCL that lists supported drives to be used with vSAN. In production setups, it is very important to use certified hardware. Using non-enterprise hardware might result in data loss and bad performance caused by the lack of power loss protection and small caches.
This article takes a look at consumer-grade SSDs and their durability to be used with vSAN. Please be aware that non-certified hardware should only be used in homelabs or for demo purposes. Do not place sensitive data on vSAN that is running on consumer hardware.
Read More »VMware vSAN on Consumer-Grade SSDs - Endurance analysis
This is a list of all available performance metrics that are available in vSphere vCenter Server 7.0. Performance counters can be views for Virtual Machines, Hosts, Clusters, Resource Pools, and other objects by opening Monitor > Performance in the vSphere Client.
These performance counters can also be used for performance analysis with esxcfg-perf.pl, or PowerCLI.
NSX-T has a default API rate limit of 100 requests per second, per client. This limit is sometimes already triggered when you are using the GUI with multiple people using the admin account. If you are using the API to get status information or configure your platform, you very likely know the error. When you exceed the limit, the following message is displayed.
Client 'admin' exceeded request rate of 100 per second.
This article shows a couple of methods to mitigate the limit.
Read More »NSX-T: Client 'admin' exceeded request rate of 100 per second.
In NSX-T, you can't create local users. Except for the three default users admin, root, and audit, you have to connect to an LDAP server or integrate NSX-T with VMware Identity Manager to authenticate with additional users. Additionally to normal users, NSX-T has the concept of Principal Identities, which are certificate-based users that can create objects that only the user itself can modify or delete.
This article explains how to create and work with a principal identity.
With the release of NSX-T 3.1, improvements to inter-TEP communication within the same host have been implemented. The Edge TEP IP can now be on the same subnet as the local hypervisor TEP. This feature reduces the complexity for collapsed setups where the Edge VM runs on an ESXi host that is also part of the Geneve overlay transport zone.
The following tunnel configuration is now possible:
Read More »NSX-T 3.1 Enhancement - Shared ESXi and Edge Transport VLAN with a Single Uplink
In ESXi 7.0 (Build 15843807) and 7.0b (Build 16324942), there is a known issue with the VMFS6 filesystem. The problem is solved in ESXi 7.0 Update 1. In certain workflows, memory is not freed correctly resulting in VMFS heap exhaustion. You might be affected when your system shows the following symptoms:
In the vmkernel.log, you see the following error messages:
With the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1, VMware introduced a new licensing model for its Tanzu Kubernetes integration. Basically, the licensing has been changed from an ESXi-Host license to a Cluster license that looks familiar to the vSAN license which is in place for a couple of years. The change does only affect how you have to apply the license. The entity to pay for is still a physical CPU.
In vSphere 7.0 GA, the license required to enable Kubernetes (aka. "Workload Management") was an add-on license for ESXi Hosts named "vSphere 7 Enterprise Plus with Kubernetes". With the introduction of vSphere 7.0 Update 1, which is also referred to as 7.0.1, "vSphere add-on for Kubernetes" has been rebranded and split into 4 licenses Tanzu Basic, Tanzu Standard, Tanzu
Read More »Tanzu Kubernetes Licensing in vSphere 7.0 Update 1
The USB Native Driver Fling, a popular ESXi driver by Songtao Zheng and William Lam that adds support for USB-based Network Adapters, has been updated to version 1.7. The new version has added support for vSphere 7.0 Update 1.
When you download the latest version, you notice that there are separate versions for 7.0 and 7.0 U1. Both versions are only compatible with their corresponding ESXi version, which makes direct updates a little bit more complex.
This article explains how to upgrade ESXi hosts with USB-based network adapters in a single step.
Read More »Update ESXi 7.0 with VMKUSB NIC Fling to 7.0 Update 1
Yesterday, I posted a screenshot on Twitter where I pulled the CPU temperature from a Raspberry Pi running ESXi-Arm using curl. If that is possible, it would be a great option to pull the data for monitoring or graphing purposes:
I got a few messages on whether this really works, or is a fake. So, here is how I did it...Read More »ESXi-Arm on Raspi - Pull CPU Temperature using Curl