Hi all,

It looks as if my little shop will be transitioning to VCF from vSphere 7 sometime next year. I would have preferred moving to VVF, but that decision was above my pay grade.

Nonetheless, I’ll cut to the chase. We are a very heavy VLAN based network. In particular, we have over a hundred instances where the same subnet is utilized over and over to better simulate the real world of the products we test. So we use those VLANs to break up those broadcast domains and prevent any IP conflicts.

In vSphere 7 this isn’t a problem, each port group is tied to a specific VLAN and we trunk those VLANs to the various switches until they get to our end devices.

Based on my own research of VCF, it seems that for a VM to communicate north/south or east/west(if on different hosts) it HAS to be connected to a segment that connects to either a tier-1/0 gateway. And if that segment connects to a gateway then a subnet is required. Finally, there can be no overlap between subnets within your network.

So, I say all that to say this, is my understanding of NSX/VCF correct, or can we also utilize the traditional VLAN backed vDS/Portgroup setup we do now?

Hi, wondering if anyone how has the full VCF with the SDDC manager deployment can help shed a little light on this please

I have setup Aria Suite Lifecycle and IDM and was moving on to creating the environment in Aria Lifecycle to add the Ops, Logs and Automation appliances, when you select the option to integrate it with the SDDC manager it forces you down the route of larger and clustered appliances

This is for a lab, so I want to save what recourses I can, but its also a demo environment and I want it to match what I will be deploying to customers in the future

From what I can see here, even with the SDDC manager, Aria Suite Lifecycle manages the upgrade of Aria products, the SDDC manager only updates Aria Suite Lifecycle, not including the content packs, so given the integration only seems to give me a link in SDDC which doesnt have any benefit

For Aria Ops, it means I need 2x medium appliances, vs 1x small
Small is 4 vCPU and 16GB of RAM suitable for 10k objects, plenty for our customers tbh, and you can scale it later if needed to a 2 node, or to a medium appliance, vs medium which is 8vCPU and 32GB RAM

Aria logs its a 3 node cluster at 8vCPU and 16GB RAM, not mental for a cluster and I could live with it, though 1 node would still be plenty

Its Aria Automation which I draw the line, at 12vCPU and 54GB of RAM each, a 3 node cluster, from the docs, only seems to add HA, which for the 150GB+ of RAM is just a waste, and our customers are 100% not going to want to burn through that, especially when 1 is plenty

I get clusters for HA, but they are VMs, and with vSphere HA its not like we are going to have massive downtime
The vCenter and SDDC manager are the most integral components and are single nodes in the VCF deployment

So, my question is, it seems much better to not integrate the environment in Aria Lifecycle with the SDDC manager, which allows me to size the appliances properly to my customers needs, and there isnt a trade off since I will have to patch it outside of the SDDC manager anyway

Does that sound right?

Thanks in advance <3

Does anyone know if you can use the reduced downtime upgrade option if you have SRM / Live Recovery integrated into your vCenter(s)?

Can’t find anything saying yes or no.

Thanks !

I should know this, but I've never had to do it. Very simple set up -- Standard VSwitch for VMs bound to 2 physical nics connected to the switch. If make the switch port a trunk port (all vlans tagged), and then on the VM set the VLAN id in the VM's operating system, the VLAN tag will pass through the vswitch to the hardware switch, correct?

Hi,

We use ClonePrep for the creation of Instant Clones running on Windows operating system. We get some issues where sometimes, usually when the clones has just been created, %logonserver% is not set and GPO are not applying. The command gpresult /r /scope:computer shows the name of the cp-template "IT******" instead of the name of the actual clone.

ClonePrep doesn't generate SID. Would using Sysprep for the creation process help to get better GPOs application, since it generate new SIDs for every clone creation ?

Thanks

Just saw that ports.vmware.com is not accesible. Have they taken it down?

Dear Community,

I hope this message finds everyone well.

I am reaching out for assistance with an issue that has arisen after adding physical memory to our hosts and subsequently rebooting them. Despite everything functioning smoothly with no apparent connectivity issues, we are encountering the following error/alarm in vSphere on two specific hosts:

Error:
"Lost network connectivity on virtual switch vSwitchBMC. Physical NIC vusb0 is down. Affected port groups: BMC_Network."

System Details:

• vSphere Client Version: 8.0.3
• Hypervisor: VMware ESXi, 8.0.0, 21203435
• Host Model: ProLiant DL360 Gen10

This issue is limited to two hosts, and I am not experiencing any performance degradation or network issues otherwise.

Actions Taken:

I initially opened two support tickets with Broadcom regarding this matter. Unfortunately, both were closed without explanation, leaving me at an impasse.

If anyone has encountered a similar situation or can offer insights or troubleshooting steps, I would greatly appreciate your support.

Thank you in advance for your help and guidance!

Hello ! I hope you're all doing well !

I'm a Swiss student who has been using vSphere environment and networking for a while now, and I wanted to embellish my learning path with NSX.

I searched hours on the web, trying to find an .ova file in order to integrate NSX into my homelab. (2 ESXi 8.0.2, 1x HP dl380p gen9 and 1x HP dl360gen9).

I dont want something illegal, I would just like to deep dive into the product. As a student, I just CAN'T buy an entitlement Hahaha... It's for a personal use ONLY...

I followed multiple tutorials on YouTube and on the official Broadcoam learning curriculum.

But it's not enough for me..... I want to get my hands dirty !!!!

Thank you in advance, and Merry Christmas to y'all !!!

Can someone confirm if this is possible:

• vSphere is on a different network to the ESXi host.
• vSphere reaches the ESXi host via a firewall rule that uses SNAT
• So the result is vSphere can connect to the ESXi host on demand but the ESXi host will never be able to connect to the vSphere host on demand.

I assume this is possible. It's currently working but vSphere reports the ESXi host is disconnected intermittently. There could be other networking issues at play though, I'd just like to rule this out first.

Thanks

Has anyone ever run into this before? I usually don't put them into maint. mode before rebooting the host but this time I did, and it bit me. I am going to likely have to "hopefully" just restart the management agents via the DCUI. This is headless or i'd just walk someone through it rather than going onsite. I've been restarting this thing for years, never using maint. mode and never an issue. The one time i do...

Anyone have any other thoughts on why this would occur and what other solutions I may have if this management network doesn't come back up?

Thanks

Hi,

I would like to install Windows 11 24H2 in vCenter 7.0.3

A message "This PC doesn't currently meet windows 11 system requirements" showed.

I have tried to "Shift + F10" to edit registry but no "back button" to retry.

What should be correct way to install ?

Thanks

Hi,

There is one of my ESXi that isn't present when I do a Get-VMHost using PowerCLI. Also all the VMs on that servers aren't not listed by Get-VMs. I tries disconnect / reconnect.

Any ideas? Thanks,

So our crappy O&M vendor decided standalone esxi. Now they don’t know the root password. Is there a way to get into the esxi if no other accounts were set up?

This version no longer makes any reference to licensing anywhere nor does it ask for a key after install. Its now a freeware.

Just installed VMWare Player 17 on Pop!_OS and having trouble getting started. I created a Windows 10 Home VM and tried to boot into it but am stuck at the "This virtual machine is powered off or suspended" screen. It sits on this screen pretty much forever until I try to kill the process. If I start VMWare back up afterwards and try to run the VM, it immediately crashes the software. I verified that I have virtualization enabled.

I'm not getting any error messages that I can see. I've installed open-vm-tools on the host machine and this doesn't seem to change anything. I also verified that the ISO I'm using is good, as it matched the hashes Microsoft provided me when I downloaded it.

https://i.imgur.com/nemXA3G.png

Here's my vmware.log: https://pastebin.com/d3P719cb

Is there a way to do a visual map of a packet trace across the network? We are interested to see if the tool can tell us how long a packet stays on one server / device until it goes to the next location.

Hi

I have a customer with a vCenter that can't connect to vmware online repositories. Therefore when you try to upgrade the cluster image for the ESXi it doesnt show the latest images so I cant upgrade it.

The vCenter has being recently upgraded from 7 to 8 and that didnt fix the issue, so I assume that the customer has some firewall restrictions (it is everything closed on his network and we have to request to open ports and urls each time we need to configure something that depends on the outside).

So in summary could you please tell me which ports and urls must be oppened to reach the online vmware repositories?

I guess the correct port is 443 but I dont know if I have to open other ones...

thanks

Patching/updating ESXi hosts hasn't been under my responsibilities until recently, so I am not overly familiar with the process or best preactices...so I have some questions.

In researching, the actual patching process seems pretty straightforward...download the patch, place the ESXi host into maintenance mode, shut down or vMotion any VMs running on that host to other hosts, then perform your patch (using esxcli seems pretty easy) and reboot. Once the hosts reboots, verify the patch took, take the host out of maintenance mode, and then reboot or vMotion any VMs back to the patched host.

So my question is more about what the best practices would be in this situation...

I have 4 DELL ESXi hosts running 7.0U3n build 21930508, that need to be patched to 7.0U3q build 23794027. The were initially installed using a DELL Custom Image ISO, as one would expect. My understanding is that I should then be able to patch theses hosts, using a generic ESXi patch in the 7.0U3 line (but if a 7.0U4 upgrade was ever released, a Custom Image ISO would be required for that).

So my initial though was to download the generic ESXi 7.0U3q build 23794027 depot zip patch (avialable here from VMware/Broadcom), and run that update on top of the DELL Custom ISO.

However, I noticed there is a newer DELL Custom Image ISO available...ESXi 7.0U3q build 23794027.

So would would the best practice be here? Use that newer DELL Custom Image Offline Bundle? If so, what does that process look like? The same as outlined above, just with the DELL Custom Offline Bundle?

Or would my initial thought of updating with the generic ESXi 7.0U3q build 23794027 depot zip patch be the way to go?

Hi,

Host Machine: 64GB RAM - 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900H 2.60 GHz

I have a Win11 VM running on my host. It said it was at it's end of life and couldn't do anymore updates. So I downloaded the latest ISO image of Win11 Pro and created a new VM. It installed fine etc. However it's horribly slow like unusable slow. I didn't do anything to the setting except I chose 16GB RAM and 8 processors with a 4 processor and 2 cores each. Anyone have any ideas on what I can do? When I start up my old Win11 VM it runs just fine. I mimicked those settings. I'm stumped. Thanks for any guidance in advance!!!!

Hello! I will cut right to the chase.

I have wanted to download VMware esxi 6.7 for some time now because i want to try it out (specifically 6.7). But I have no idea how to download it as an ISO... It's reached its EOL but I had a friend who lives a bit away from me install it on one of my systems so I'm not really sure what's happening or what to do. I want to install esxi to my other hosts to create a cluster. Any help anyone?

I am trying to get the best custom kernel for my use case, and was asking which modules does Vmware Workstation (17.6.1 build-24319023) rely on (the network ones),

for example, Docker relies on namespaces and veth and macvlan, how about Workstation ? Because even if I checked what is related to network, it still fails to boot with Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to power on and doing sudo /usr/bin/vmware-modconfig --console --install-all makes it fail Virtual ethernet failed and this issue disappears when removing vmnet1 and 8 which does not make sense

I am using a custom Kernel 6.12.5, works perfectly fine on the latest Mainline 6.12.3 as it's generic and not customised.

Here is my custom config file :

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/abdelouahabb/b9bb4b29aa8d7b4ca5b132d8b1f1dc29/raw/a4388ee9b77ac639118ab6c49689699b624945a0/.config

First of all, I should preface this with I do not have much experience with VMware. I recently changed employers. There are 4 esxi hosts connected to the core via 10Gb. When I was investigating the 33 VMs, 20 of them were only showing 1Gb connections. All VMs are Server 2016/2019/2022 running esxi 6.0, 6.7, or 7.0. They are using the E1000E driver. Do these VMs truly only have a 1Gb connection back to the network based off of this driver? The other 13 VMs are using VMXNET3 driver. I'm thinking I need to change these 20 VMs to the vmxnet3 driver as soon as possible, but wanted to make sure doing this isn't a waste of my time.

I am reading some ESXi documentation today and stumbled over the notification docs.vmware.com will be decomissioned ("This site will be decommissioned on December 31st 2024. Please visit techdocs.broadcom.com for the latest content."). I have tried to find ESXi or vCenter documentation there for about 15 minutes with no luck yet.

Under VMware vSphere only VMware Tools. SDKs and Converter are listed as products. In the Cloud Foundation category there are only validated solutions. Even a google search with site:techdocs.broadcom.com does not give me the new location of a specific article (Securing the ESXi Configuration Overview).

This is really annoying and I could swear about this being another typical broadcom move (like it happened in the other 2 threads mentioning the transition to the techdocs). But this would not help me in any way. I only need a practical way to work with the techdocs...

Hi everyone,

I have a question about Broadcom's new licensing policy. Broadcom has changed the way they license their products and migrated old licenses to a new licensing portal. What does the transition of old products and licenses to the new system (new products, new licensing) look like? Has anyone had experience with this at larger companies?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

On support.broadcom.com the subscription to VMware Security Announces (VMSA) is hidden behind notifications (Profile --> Notification Settings). This menu is only visible if you already have jumped through the hoop "Build your profile" that is only usable when you are using a "corporate email". What the f*ck are they thinking?

Is there another way to subscribe to Security Announces?

People,
What could be the reason for Web Client refreshing so frequently - every 3-5 seconds, and 2-3 times in a row, i.e., it will refresh two or three times back to back, and then 3-5 seconds again two to three times back to back, and so on.

i got blocked on broadcom and VMware Tools is no longer shipped with VMware Workstation for legacy guest operating systems. (how to install it now???)

So, I'm trying to install Windows 11 on VMware, and there is a driver problem, so I connected a apple mouse to fix it and install Windows 11. But VMware thinks that the apple mouse I connected is needed for my computer to function properly even though it doesn't (my computer has a trackpad). Is there any way I can fix this and mount the apple mouse to the VM? Thanks.

Can anyone share from personal experience what negative consequences from not having access to the Administrator@vsphere.local account. I will have an account with similar access.

I know support often askes for you to log in with this or root accounts when troubleshooting

Help me defend my access

Adding to this, i will never have acess to the password, it will be in a vault in another country

Also they want vmware off the domain

I have other accounts that I use, i in no way use this as my daily account, mostly during updates/ uprades and support calls