ESXi 6.5 Release Notes for free license and white box users

VMware has made vSphere 6.5 generally available on November 15th, and this includes the core hypervisor platform ESXi 6.5. In the What's New and Release Notes documents you can read all about the exciting new features, but most of them require paid licenses and a vCenter server to centrally manage your ESXi hosts.

This blog post is my first try to explain what free license users and owners of unsupported ("white box") hardware need to know when they are going for an upgrade or installation of ESXi 6.5 ...

[Update] ESXi-Customizer-PS 2.5 - The ESXi image customization script

This is just a quick heads up for the users of my ESXi-Customizer-PS script for ESXi image builds and customizations. I have just published the new version 2.5 of the script, and that adds

• full support of vSphere 6.5 (use the new -v65 switch to limit Image profile selection)
• support of PowerCLI 6.5
• enhanced logging capabilities

If you have run into issues with older versions of the script then please update now and let me know how it goes.

In the meantime VMware has also published the ESXi 6.5 GA bits to its Online Depot, and that means it is very easy to create an ESXi 6.5 installation ISO or Offline bundle with my script. Just run it without any arguments for the ISO file (or only the -ozip switch for the Offline Bundle), and it will do its magic.

Have fun!

---

This post first appeared on the VMware Front Experience Blog and was written by Andreas Peetz. Follow him on Twitter to keep up to date with what he posts.

---

---