Tag: #broadcom

Home Lab, VCF

Guide to Upgrading ESXi Hosts Using CLI

sargonkhizeran

With recent articles I published about Commission ESXI hosts (see here), with VMware Cloud Foundation, I prepared 3 of my physical servers with an ESXi image and not managed by vCenter. I want to commission these hosts to SDDC Manager 5.2.1.1, however, during my initial install, the version was no longer compatible. During validation, I came across the following error

This led me to want to upgrade the hosts via CLI and as extra help for others out there.

With that, I needed to resort to either re-image the hosts entirely or perform an in-place upgrade, and that is where the traditional esxcli command came to the rescue.

Please see Broadcom Article ID: 380215 regarding changes to esxcli syntax with upgrading hosts from host CLI

The SATADOM on my SuperMicro E300 servers is only 64GB, so I needed some additional options to mount a datastore, that is when I decided to just use iSCSI storage to mount to the standalone host and upload the binary up to that datastore, and this would now be available to all my hosts once I get a iSCSI Software Adaptor added.

This upgrade requires a reboot. To learn more about vSphere 8.0 ESXCLI, please refer to Broadcom Documentation here. Next step is to SSH into the ESXi host and from CLI place the host in Maintenance Mode so that we can safely reboot after the image is updated.

Placing the host in Maintenance Mode

esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true

Verify Host is in Maintenance Mode, should report back with ‘Enabled’ (and you can check in the Host UI)

esxcli system maintenanceMode get

The next command is to obtain the Image Profile of the uploaded *.zip file. See example below

esxcli software sources profile list --depot=<depot_URL>

Here are our images, you will want to Copy either the no-tools or standard image

The next command will perform the actual update to the image. I had to add the ‘ –no-hardware-warning’ because an error was thrown out relating to hardware support, however I had another host have it go through, you can try with or without.

esxcli software profile update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/67a7e705-b1512891-3923-5847ca7a9948/esxi803c/VMware-ESXi-8.0U3c-24414501-depot.zip --profile=ESXi-8.0U3c-24414501-standard --no-hardware-warning

The result should bring you to what VIBs were installed, removed and skipped.

You can see the Reboot Required, and from the CLI just type ‘reboot’ and the host will reboot.

Once the host is back up, from the UI check the profile

To validate the final reason I went through all this, the host can now successfully commission in SDDC Manager.

Happy Homelabbing!

Home Lab, VCF

Upgrading VMware Cloud Foundation SDDC Manager (Independent) from 5.2.1.0 to 5.2.1.1

sargonkhizeran

The following article is a simple step-by-step walkthrough of going through the steps of upgrading VMware Cloud Foundation, starting with SDDC Manager and then a Management Domain. You can read more on Broadcom TechDocs for the Independent SDDC Manager Upgrade using the SDDC Manager UI

Please note that this is being performed in a personal home lab. Always take precautions and contact Broadcom support or any services through a partner for guidance.

From the SDDC Manager, go over to ‘Lifecycle Management’ on the left-hand navigation pane and select ‘SDDC Manager’ and you should find a package available to download. Once you click Download, the download will begin.

Once the download completes, you will find two options, we will run the Precheck first.

A message where the Download status appeared will later appear with a Precheck complete confirmation and an option to click View Details.

The precheck clears; this is a clean instance of SDDC Manager as it was recently deployed.

Scroll a little further down and look at the various tests

When you go back to the SDDC Manager initial screen, you can kick off the update by clicking ‘Update Now’

Please follow the documentation. Going into this, I purposely did not snapshot the SDDC Manager because I wanted to test what it was going to do.

Click ‘Start Upgrade’

Status updates

The primary UI will switch in a moment however you can go over to the tasks and check the status

Screen should cutover to the following to provide the upgrade process

Monitor all the various updates, it’s good to know these orders to help with any troubleshooting if needed

Once completed, the option to click ‘Finish’ will be there and then the SDDC Manager UI screen should load.

The next set of updates should be a Management Domain and it’s respective components.

Home Lab, VCF

Deploying VCF 5.2.1 Management Domin w/ vSAN ESA on physical MINIS FORUM MS-01 using Hardware Mock Vib

sargonkhizeran

Alright, sorry for the long title, but after a crazy last two months, I’ve finally gotten around to a homelab rebuild and needed to give the physical deployment another shot.

This time I wanted to use our very own William Lam’s vSAN ESA hardware mock VIB for physical ESXi deployment for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Now, William has already done the work, so I hit up the referenced GitHub for William. Downloaded the Pre-Built VIB ‘nested-vsan-esa-mock-hw.vib’

Using WinSCP, I uploaded the vib into the ‘/tmp’ directory on each host. Access the hosts via SSH and ran the following commands (in listed order) as instructed in Lam’s instructions.

 esxcli software acceptance set --level CommunitySupported
esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/nested-vsan-esa-mock-hw.vib --no-sig-check
/etc/init.d/vsanmgmtd restart

Now that everything is ready on the hosts, I went to my VCF deployment parameter spreadsheet and configured the vSphere Datastore section under ‘Deploy Parameters’. I selected Yes to both Dedup and Compression as well as ESA. I have all NVMe storage in these boxes.

The Validate Configuration passed with all Success, this was a first time I made it through the vSAN HCL and ESA checks and I was just hoping everything else was going smooth, (I had also had to relocate my homelab into a new home and re-do my networking..and thankfully was able to restore lots of my settings.

Checking out the Management Domain and we found vSAN ESA is showing

Of the 8TB of raw physical storage, we have about 6.4TB available

What I really should be doing next is working to automate this or at least create an ESXi image with the vib and Community Supported flag in place.

Big thanks to William Lam and the community for continuously building and sharing.

Cloud Management, LCM, Video

Using an NFS share as a Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager Repository for Binaries [Updated] [Video]

sargonkhizeran

With the Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager appliance there are a few different ways you can load binaries so that you can Install or Update products managed. The VMware to Broadcom transition during the time of this blog is still in place and some customers may be experiencing some minor delays with systems migrating to the Broadcom Support Portal.

Please note before performing any upgrades that you review Release Notes for targeted versions, have a backup plan in place and ensure you’re checking interoperability for single or multi-step upgrades as well as product integrations;

Review the following VMware documentation on Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager – Configure product binaries

One method I was testing in my lab was downloading binaries on a NFS share on my Synology

I created a new folder called NFS and ensured I gave it NFS Permissions, for my lab I opened up a range from a network so that everything as access to it, I suggest you take all security measures with doing this.

After the folder is created, you can choose anyway you would want to upload binaries to the NAS, uploading through browser Drag and Drop or if you happen to have it shared over SMB.

To help with obtaining the path, from within Synology’s FileStation, right-click on the folder and select ‘Properties’

Now that we have our files uploaded, permissions established, we can now go to Aria Suite Lifecycle >> Settings >> Binary Mapping

Select the NFS option and populate the location, select the package and click ‘Add’

**Note that some packages may fail upload due to incompatibility with a support pack or no instance of the product detected.

As a test we will be upgrading Aria Operations 8.16.0 to 8.17.1

After it completes it should now appear as a added binary

When we go to our Environment and select Upgrade for Aria Operations, you can see it recognizes a compatible upgrade.