vSphere 7.0

Delivers simplified lifecycle management, intrinsic security and application acceleration for traditional applications.

vSphere 7: Automatic Start of vSphere Auto Deploy Service

mhuellerLeave a comment

Recently, I was working with a customer with more than 100 Hosts who wanted to upgrade to vSphere 7.x. One of his requirements was that he did not want to install / upgrade hosts manually.

As he already has experience in using Host Profiles and Auto Deploy with vSphere 6.5/6.7, the infrastructure was already in place.

During the day we decided to use the VMware ISO 7.0 U1b (Build 17168206) with vendor Addon Cisco UCS Addon ESXi-70U1-16850804 for the cluster with the Cisco M5 servers to setup a customized image.

But where do you make sure that the Auto Deploy Service starts automatically in case you restart the vCenter Server 7? In the GUI of the VAMI interface you cannot set the Startup Type to Automatic.

Upgrading existing Hosts to ESXi 7.x on the Command Line

mhuellerLeave a comment

Recently, I wanted to upgrade a 6.7 host to 7.x and thought about reinstalling via my PXE server, but my server did not boot the image.

Now what? Troubleshooting? Analyzing logs? No … I decided to go via command line install because I preferred to replace the installed image.

See starting point in the UI:

And in putty:

You can get the image online if you make sure that ESXi firewall allows access with:

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

Next is the command:

esxcli software profile install –depot=https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/ PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml –profile=ESXi-7.0b-16324942-standard –ok-to-remove

See this documentation link for more information: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.esxi.upgrade.doc/GUID-E51C5DB6-F28E-42E8-ACA4-0EBDD11DF55D.html

So far so good, but I received “Got no data from process: LANG=en_US.UTF-8 …” and it stopped. I found the following hint of another vExpert (Wesley Geelhoed) here: https://wesleygeelhoed.nl/2020/04/17/insufficient-locker-space-while-installing-esxi-7-0/
which I tried because I am using USB devices as well to boot ESXi. I did not want to take a look at the logs.

After that, it worked fine:

 

Patching your ESXi 7.x Hosts on the Command Line

mhuellerLeave a comment

Do you still remember how to patch ESXi on the command line?

  1. Download the patch from https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch
  2. Save the depot on a share reachable by your hosts (in my case a NFS share)
  3. Enable SSH on your hosts and connect
  4. Put your host of choice into Maintenance Mode
  5. Execute esxcli software vib update –depot=/path/to/your/file/location/VMware-ESXi-7.0b-16324942-depot.zip
  6. Reboot host if required

See some screenshots for your reference

Starting point:

esxcli software vib update –depot=/path/to/your/file/location/VMware-ESXi-7.0b-16324942-depot.zip:

Finished:

vSphere 7: Look at vSphere Lifecycle Manager

mhuellerLeave a comment

As I am upgrading my personal lab environment, I took a look at the new vSphere Lifecycle Manager to get upgrades of ESXi hosts done. An easy to use cool tool …

Import ISO

First, it is about to import an ISO as source for upgrades.

Create and Attach Baseline

Remediate

Scheduling Options let you plan the upgrade to a timeframe that fits your requirements

You can also configure remediation settings

I ran into the problem, that I suffered from errors: HostUpgradePrecheckTestFailMissingDependencyVibs

On this particular host, I had NSX-T 2.5.some.thing installed in the past but it did not exist anymore. So I ended up in removing NSX Vibs manually from my host – see this part of the documentation for help on that:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.esxi.upgrade.doc/GUID-7FFEBD91-5D82-4E32-93AB-F10D8BFFECAA.html

After removing the Vibs and rebooting the server, I could restart the remediation and it went through without challenges.