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2020

VMware Tools for Fedora 32 aarch64 on ESXi-Arm

VMware Tools is a set of utilities and drivers that improve the performance and management of your Virtual Machines. They are essential when running VMs on ESXi. With the recently released ESXi Arm Edition Fling, you want to make sure that you have them installed.

Fedora is a Linux distribution developed by the community-supported Fedora Project. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of free technologies.

Unfortunately, a compiled version of open-vm-tools for aarch64 is not available for many common Guest Operating Systems, so you have to compile them from VMwares Repository at GitHub.

This article explains how to compile open-vm-tools for Fedora 32 aarch64.

Read More »VMware Tools for Fedora 32 aarch64 on ESXi-Arm

VMware Tools for CentOS 8 aarch64 on ESXi-Arm

VMware Tools is a set of utilities and drivers that improve the performance and management of your Virtual Machines. They are essential when running VMs on ESXi. With the recently released ESXi Arm Edition Fling, you want to make sure that you have them installed.

CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System) is a Linux distribution that provides a free, community-supported computing platform functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Unfortunately, a compiled version of open-vm-tools for aarch64 is not available for many common Guest Operating Systems, so you have to compile them from VMwares Repository at GitHub.

This article explains how to compile open-vm-tools for CentOS 8 aarch64.

Read More »VMware Tools for CentOS 8 aarch64 on ESXi-Arm

Change TKG Cluster Service and Pod CIDR in Cloud Director 10.2

A major problem when deploying "vSphere with Tanzu" Clusters in VMware Cloud Director 10.2 is that the defaults for TKG Clusters are overlapping with the defaults for the Supervisor Cluster configured in vCenter Server during the Workload Management enablement.

When you deploy a Kubernetes Cluster using the new Container Extension in VCD 10.2, it deploys the cluster in a namespace on top of the Supervisor Cluster in the vCenter Server. The Supervisor Clusters IP address ranges for the Ingress CIDRs and Services CIDR must not overlap with IP addresses 10.96.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16, which is the default for TKG Clusters. Unfortunately, 10.96.0.0 is also the default when enabling workload management so the deployment will fail when you stick to the defaults. The following error message is displayed when you have overlapping networks:

spec.settings.network.pods.cidrBlocks intersects with the network range of the external ip pools in network provider's configuration
spec.settings.network.pods.cidrBlocks intersects with the network range of the external ip pools LB in network provider's configuration

This article explains a workaround that you can apply when deleting and reconfiguring the Namespace Management with non-overlapping addresses is not an option.

Read More »Change TKG Cluster Service and Pod CIDR in Cloud Director 10.2

Troubleshooting "vSphere with Tanzu" Integration in VCD 10.2

During my first attempts to integrate "vSphere with Tanzu" into VMware Cloud Director 10.2, I had a couple of issues. The integration just wasn't as smooth as I expected and many configuration errors are not mitigated in the GUI. Also, there are a lot of prerequisites to strictly follow.

In this article, I'm going through the issues I had during the deployment and how to solve them.Read More »Troubleshooting "vSphere with Tanzu" Integration in VCD 10.2

Configure "vSphere with Tanzu" in VMware Cloud Director 10.2

With the release of Cloud Director 10.2, you can now integrate "vSphere with Tanzu" Kubernetes Clusters into VMware Cloud Director. That enabled you to create a self-service platform for Kubernetes Clusters that are backed by the Kubernetes integration in vSphere 7.0.

This article explains how to integrate vSphere with Tanzu in VMware Cloud Director 10.2

Read More »Configure "vSphere with Tanzu" in VMware Cloud Director 10.2

Introducing Simplified Deployment for VMware Cloud Director 10.2

With the release of Cloud Director 10.2, VMware aims to make the deployment easier and more robust with a new deployment UI that includes error-checking. In previous versions, you had to provide the initial configuration with vAPP options during the OVA deployment. When there was a problem, which was very common, especially with the NFS share, you had to redeploy the system. Redeploying the appliance multiple times was was very time-consuming.

In Cloud Director 10.2, the operation has been split into 2 stages, as you know it from the vCenter Server. You first deploy the OVA with some basic settings that are not error-prone and then log into a web interface to do the actual Cloud Director configuration like setting up the NFS share and create the Administrator Account.

This article does a quick review of the installation using my OVF Helper Scripts and the new two-stage appliance system setup.

Read More »Introducing Simplified Deployment for VMware Cloud Director 10.2

Will ESXi 7.0 Update 1 run on Intel NUC?

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0 Update 1 is here. If you have Intel NUCs in your homelab you should always be very careful when updating to new ESXi releases as there might be issues. Please always keep in mind that this is not an officially supported platform.

Typically, you see problems with new major releases (eg. the Realtek problem in ESXi 7.0) but this time we seem to run into a problem with 8th Gen NUCs in the 7.0 U1 release. The Intel I219-V (6) network adapter fails to load after upgrading to ESXi 7.0 U1. When you try to do a fresh installation, it fails with the well known "No Network Adapters" error.

To be on the safe side, I'm doing a quick checkup on which NUCs are safe to update and where you have to implement a workaround.

In the meantime: Stay Calm, you can run ESXi 7.0 U1 on the 8th Gen NUC!

Read More »Will ESXi 7.0 Update 1 run on Intel NUC?

ESXi on Raspberry Pi - Scripted Installation with Kickstart

In the last article, I've explained how to automate the preparation that is required to install ESXi on a Raspberry Pi using the ESXi on ARM Fling. This article covers the last step, the ESXi installation itself.

I'm covering 2 installation examples:

  • Basic installation, resulting in an ESXi with DHCP enabled
  • Advanced installation including static IP address, Datastore, NTP, SSH key, and SSH enabled.

I highly recommend using the second example as the Pi needs an NTP Server to run with the correct time after reboots. You can just remove any configuration snippets that you don't need.

Read More »ESXi on Raspberry Pi - Scripted Installation with Kickstart

ESXi on RPi - Create EEPROM and Firmware SD Card with PowerShell

The installation of ESXi on a Raspberry Pi using the ESXi on ARM Fling basically involves 3 steps:

  1. Patch RPi EEPROM to the latest version using an SD card. You can reuse the SD card in Step 2.
  2. Write RPi Firmware and EFI to an SD Card. This is the bootloader for ESXi and needs to remain in your RPis SD slot, even after ESXi installation.
  3. Install ESXi on ARM using a USB flash drive (This step is identical to x86 Hardware)

I've tried to make this sprocess unattended so I've created two PowerShell functions that automate Step 1 and 2.

Read More »ESXi on RPi - Create EEPROM and Firmware SD Card with PowerShell

ESXi on Raspberry Pi - Quick way to update EEPROM

Step 3.2 from the official ESXi on ARM Fling guide describes the installation of Raspberry Pi Os just for the purpose of checking that the EEPROM is up-to-date. If you do not have a preinstalled Raspberry Pi Os, there is a quick alternative that allows you to speed up this step.

Instead of using Raspberry Pi Os to update the EEPROM you can use the Raspberry Pi 4 EEPROM boot recovery tool to get the latest version installed in less than 10 seconds.

There are two options to work with the recovery tool:

Read More »ESXi on Raspberry Pi - Quick way to update EEPROM