For many years home labs, and even in some production environments, booting VMware ESXi from a SD card or USB stick was an easy and simple way to deploy ESXi. For example, up until today I booted my Dell Precision 7920 ESXi 7 host from a high endurance SD card...
The other day I was at a customer for a fresh installation of Nutanix using vSphere 6.5. And for whatever reason, when they were resetting the ESXi root password to their default, it was fat fingered. When they went to add the hosts to vCenter, they couldn't add them since...
On rare occasions you may need to downgrade your ESXi host. In my case I was working on a VMware certification test and my host was using a newer build than what was called for. Or, maybe you run into a situation like the NFS bug earlier this year and needed to...
Hot off the presses are some ESXi 5.1 patches. This build of ESXi 5.1 (1157734) fixes several bugs and more importantly addresses some security issues. As always in any environment, please test out the patches thoroughly before putting them into production. Each environment is unique, and issues may surface that could cause you some headaches. These...
VMware vSphere 5.1 update 1 is probably one of the most recently anticipated updates of the VMware stack and it has finally hit the streets. For those of you following the release of vSphere 5.1, you have seen the GA release last fall, followed by 5.1.0a then a couple of...
Welcome to a post which will let you easily update your VMware ESXi host SSL certificates. Last year when I was writing my 15-part vSphere 5.1 installation and configuration series I didn't include instructions on how to replace the ESXi SSL certificate. That process hasn't changed for ages, so I put it...
UPDATE 2 5/15/2012: Looks like VMware/Cisco pulled the 5.0 U1 custom ISO installation media. So follow my blog post below to create your own. UPDATE 1 4/23/12: Cisco released a customized vSphere 5.0 U1 installation ISO with all of their latest drivers. You can download it here under OEM Customized Installer...