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Florian Grehl

Power over Ethernet HAT Options for ESXi-Arm on Raspberry Pi

Power over Ethernet is a nifty solution to run your Raspberry Pi without an additional power supply. You can fully run ESXi-Arm on a Raspberry Pi with a single RJ45 network cable.

If you want to build a cluster of Pies or just want to have a clean setup, get a PoE HAT. This article explains the options that you have to add PoE support for your Raspberry Pi for the following use cases:

  • Standalone ESXi with 2.5" or M.2 SSD
  • ESXi Cluster using iSCSI Storage
  • vSAN Witness

Read More »Power over Ethernet HAT Options for ESXi-Arm on Raspberry Pi

VMware Tools for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS arm64 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.

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian. It is officially released in three editions: Desktop, Server, and Core. Ubuntu is released every six months, with long-term support (LTS) releases every two years. As of 22 October 2020, the most recent long-term support release is 20.04 ("Focal Fossa"), which is supported until 2025 under public support

Unfortunately, a compiled version of open-vm-tools for arm64 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 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS arm64.

Read More »VMware Tools for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS arm64 on ESXi-Arm

VMware Tools for openSUSE 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.

openSUSE is a Linux distribution sponsored by SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH and other companies. openSUSE offers Leap, a distribution built on a more tested base shared with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), effectively making Leap a non-commercial version of its enterprise-grade operating system. Users that prefer more up-to-date free software can use its rolling release distribution Tumbleweed.

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 openSUSE Tumbleweed aarch64.

Read More »VMware Tools for openSUSE aarch64 on ESXi-Arm

VMware Tools for Debian 10 arm64 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.

Debian is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project. It is one of the oldest and the most popular edition for personal computers and servers. Debian is also the basis for many other distributions.

Unfortunately, a compiled version of open-vm-tools for arm64 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 Debian 10 arm64.

Read More »VMware Tools for Debian 10 arm64 on ESXi-Arm

VMware Tools for Alpine 3 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.

Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.

This article explains how to install open-vm-tools on Alpine Linux 3.

Read More »VMware Tools for Alpine 3 aarch64 on ESXi-Arm

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