2014 - the fourth year of V-Front - is coming to an end. Like in the last years I have a list of highlights that I want to share - in case you missed any of them ...
Tools
The very first post of 2014 was about my ESXi-Customizer and ESXi-Customizer-PS tools. There I declared ESXi-Customizer deprecated, and I have not updated it since then. Instead I enhanced ESXi-Customizer-PS to support VIB files - so the only drawback that it still has today is the lack of a decent GUI.
I hoped that my VMware Fling Contest entry would have changed that, but sadly the jury did not pick my submission. BTW Congratulations to the winner Zachary Widing: his suggestion to update the Onyx fling to support the vSphere Web Client was just a no-brainer ...
So I need to build the GUI for ESXi-Customizer-PS myself - a nice coding project for 2015 that I'm really looking forward to!
Blog post highlights
What was hot in 2014:
- How to make your unsupported SATA AHCI Controller work with ESXi 5.5 is an old post of 2013, but I worked on it (resp. the sata-xahci package) for the whole year 2014, and the post quickly became the most viewed article here ever (more than 80k views as of today!).
- How to make your unsupported NIC work with ESXi 5.x is similar and nicely shows how you can use the PowerCLI-based ESXi-Customizer-PS tool together with the V-Front Online Depot to create ESXi installation ISOs for machines with unsupported network controllers.
- I continued my successful "How to update your standalone ESXi host" series when ESXi 5.5 U1 and U2 were released.
- It is noteworthy and very useful for home and lab users that VMware silently added native USB 3.0 support to ESXi 5.5.
- And last but not least VMware confirmed that ESXi supports SSD TRIM so that I could update my Using SSDs with ESXi FAQ accordingly.
A big thanks goes to
- the sponsors of my blog: They help me covering the costs of my hosted lab setup by placing ads here. Be sure to check out their products and offerings if you haven't done so already!
- the readers of my blog: I hope that you find useful information and tools here. Please subscribe via RSS feed, Google+, Twitter and/or E-Mail to not miss a post!
- the VMware Community guys for running the greatest IT Community on Earth and awarding me the vExpert title for the third time in 2014!
This post first appeared on the VMware Front Experience Blog and was written by Andreas Peetz.
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I found your blog a while ago, and let me tellya, it has been INVALUABLE when it came to learning how to make my ESXi whitebox work. It kept showing up in search results for the problems I was having, so I just bookmarked it. Thanks for all your work, Andreas!
ReplyDeleteThank you, much appreciated!
DeleteMany thanks for all your work, your site is a real asset as you explain stuff in a simple to understand way :)
ReplyDeleteHappy holidays!