Everything-Virtual

Category: ESXi 6

  • VMware Academy Training Experience – vSphere 6 ICM Course with 360GSP

    Over the years I have 360gspexperienced a lot of VMware training, whether that’s been with a VMware VATC (VMware Approved Training Centre), Directly with VMware or via the VMware Academy route.

    My previous VCP 4 and 5 training has been carried out via the Academy route and rarely differed from the usual VATC provided training, the only difference between the Academy and VATC’s in the past was that the Academy could offer weekend training dates and also lasted 8 days instead of the usual 5 days.

    In previous times training with an Academy still meant that you had to sign up for the class on the MyLearn VMware site, had to attend all the lessons and be signed off the class by the instructor, you also received a heavily discounted voucher for the VCP exam and a reasonable time to sit that exam. Again training with a VATC only provided the course attendance and no discounted VCP voucher. This time around I discovered that there has been a change to the way that the course attendance is marked and also an additional benefit that all students should use to aid in their study and understanding of the technology.

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  • Installing ESXi 6 with BlackListed Drivers – Net55-r8168

    My lab is in constant turmoil, it’s a fresh installation every couple of months, back when I was labbing with vSphere 5.1 it wasn’t much of an issue installing the native ESXi 5.0 or 5.1 ISO to the Shuttle SH67H3 chassis that makes up the backbone of my lab (I run 3 of them). When VMware released vSphere 5.5 around 18 months ago they removed the drivers for the Realtek r8168 and r8169 NICs (amongst others) and this caused an issue during my first rebuild (rather than upgrade which kept the original 5.1 driver).

    Move forward to the vSphere 6 launch and VMware have gone one step further and not only kept the driver out of the release but have now gone and blacklisted the driver, so if you had it installed on your 5.5 installation and carried out an upgrade you’re going to be disappointed because ESXi6 prevents installing the older 5.1 drivers via blacklisting (more information can be found over at the excellent @VFrontDe website).

    Now Andreas has gone a step further and created a new driver bundle and placed it on his vibsdepot site and it’s well worth downloading.

    Now I have to admit that I cheated when it came to installing the new vib in to the ESXi 6.0 media, rather than using his ESXi-Customizer-PS utility I simply used his older ESXi-Customizer tool instead, yes it’s been deprecated but actually it still works and it created the ISO using the download ISO rather than requiring the offline bundle.

    Carried out the installation following my VMware Workstation 11 post to ensure that the formatwithmbr setting was used to ensure that the USB drive didn’t turn itself back to Read-Only but apart from that the whole process was simple to do thanks to the hard work that Andreas has done.