Goodbye VMware, Hello Broadcom
A little history
November 21, 2023 Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO – no introduction needed, I hope) announced that November 22, 2023, acquisition and acquisition of VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) will be closed.
Goodnight, sweet Kumar, let your phone's newer light go green.
In January 2024, a change in licensing policy was announced for the whole range of programsno more free snacks and VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition)
On May 13, 2024, they tried to sweeten this trouble by making the home version free – VMware Workstation Proat the same time it was renamed to VMware Desktop Hypervisor, and a subscription was made for organizations for $120 per year.
Since May 2024, the transfer of everything that was there has begun – from VMware Customer Connect and related services to the Broadcom Support Portal.
Who remembers the split of Hewlett-Packard Company into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. in 2014, when it was already impossible to find anything on the old hp.com, and still impossible on the new hpe.com, and nothing worked properly? It's the same here, only worse, and now they're asking you to pay annually to participate in this circus. Previously, they were just asking you to be there beta tester called Initial Availabilityand then, if all goes well, issue General Availability.
Now they pretend that nothing like that happened, there are no letters IA/Ga in the release, and the patch is, as usual, crooked. I wonder, has there been at least one patch in the last 5 years that was properly tested, and not releasing five more patches for it every week?
This time the problems start with the phrase Pre-install failed for vmidentity:Expand” error.
List of problems, quotes from reddit:
I just got off the phone with support. Apparently it's due to a Non-CA certificate with an alias of ssoserver. They have an internal document for this issue but it isn't available publicly yet. These are the steps they gave me to fix it:
SSH to the vCenter Server
List the Certificates and identify the Alias of Non-CA Certificate with CN=ssoserver
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vecs-cli entry list –store TRUSTED_ROOTS –text | egrep 'Alias|ssoserver|Key Usage' -A 1 | egrep -v 'Entry type|–'
Take a backup of the certificate that shows CN=ssoserver ~Note:~ Replace with the Alias ID identified from the above step.
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vecs-cli entry getcert –store TRUSTED_ROOTS –alias –output /var/tmp/non_ca_ssoserver.crt
Remove the certificate from VECS Store. ~Note:~ Replace with the Alias ID identified from above step.
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vecs-cli entry delete –store TRUSTED_ROOTS –alias -y
Perform Certificate list again and make sure the certificate is removed
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vecs-cli entry list –store TRUSTED_ROOTS –text | egrep 'Alias|ssoserver|Key Usage' -A 1 | egrep -v 'Entry type|–'
Now we can proceed with the vCenter upgrade.
I had a few 3rd party trusted root CAs installed when I was messing with various certs – Cloudflare, Let'sEncrypt X1… so followed this KB to remove them and upgrade went through:
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/326288/removing-expired-ca-certificates-from-th.html
For “You have reached maximum number of retries to resume the patching”:
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/313301/vcenter-server-update-fails-with-error-i.html
In addition I hit “Failed to perform Cleanup” although upgrade succeeded, so used script from:
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/313290/vcenter-80-u2-patching-fails-with-the-er.html
What it came to (this paragraph can be skipped)
Everything is very bad, painful, unpleasant and inconvenient, and return it to how it was!
Things weren't worse even when the thick-thin client was removed after 6.0, replacing it with two equally flawed Web interfaces – one on Adobe Flash, the second on HTML 5. The first was slow, the second didn't have half the functions.
Moreover, it was not worse even when, during the transition from 6.7 to 7.0, they removed support for still quite suitable RAID adapters and normally working processors.
Now people are forced to build business systems on SATA drives, and use SATA controllers built into motherboards, which is why everything breaks and deteriorates, and even adding new sticks generously lubricated with imported brown clay, almost identical to natural clay, does not help (It spreads easily on bread, but the taste is not very good yet). Of course, the only thing to blame for this is the capitalist thirst for profit; they could have done it right from the start.
In defense of Broadcom, I can only quote a little-known (and, alas, deceased) author:
Once every fifty days, the sleeping laptop woke up and audited resources, in particular, it checked the integrity of files on the eight-terabyte SSD drive. As failures accumulated and memory segments failed, files were rewritten to the remainingThe stubborn machine also continued to operate as best it could and as best it could..
But Russian specialists were able to overcome all the difficulties and still sent virtual objects to the famous Khu area. []having carried away configuration sequence numbers (CSN).
Just like before them, the same specialists set up IgnoreClusterMemberListupdates with experienced hands.
And then these same hands will be used to write comments on the Internet, and in resumes too.
This is what a normal product has brought to this buffoon Hock Tan!
That's all that can happen promise a distant bright future.
How good that The era of VMware is endingand you can dig up the stewardess Go to Russian freely available Xen, or even on bhyve, and eat learn something new about split brain, data conversion to mush when hosted engine is lost and its launch with crooked starterthe impossibility of launching from the command line without magic, getting a mess out of data, and a lot of other adventures (depending on the product and version, the list of adventures may differ).
Or, you can select an input (not sure if this is an input, because those who have tried it say it hurts a lot), from cloudstack > openVCloud > DigitalEnergy > Basis Dynamix. And I’m not sure that at any stage it got better, because if you scratch a little, it will come up Openstack Victoria from 2020. What, will there be news after six months of stories that it will be good, you just have to wait?
I read that in Basis in June 2024 they were able to repeat storage vmotion, quote:
It is now possible to transfer VM disks between different data storage systems (Storage)
– Total 15 years after VMware. Apparently, this is an addition to the 95% that were promised last year.
The list of innovations is astounding:
The product has been updated with a service for transferring logs to external information systems (Syslog, gRPC, RestAPI)
Wasn't it necessary until 2024? Of course, it's strange that 4 days have already passed, and there were no links on Habr to the Basis Dynamix 4.0 Compatibility Guide, or how it surpasses all known analogs in speed. It was tested for compatibility, wasn't it? And for speed, wasn't it? How many IOPS did you get on 100G RDMA and iSER? How did the test go for working in Active – Active without LACP – that is, in what Broadcom calls Switch, and Microsoft calls Switch Embedded Teaming (SET)? Where can I read about the operation of a virtual switch port towards virtual machines in trunk mode?
All this, of course, is not mandatory, what's so special about virtualization? Fruit is fruit, flower is flower95% of functions, mouth closed, materiel in the original…
However, let me return to the topic.
What else happened by the end of June 2024
More October 15, 2022 VMware 6.5 and 6.7 support has ended.
Latest official “for everyone” update for VMware ESXi 6.5 – 20502893 – released on October 6, 2022, and for the lucky owners of extended support – on March 5, 2024, a critical update was released 23084120.
The situation for VMware 6.7 is similar – the ESXi 20497097 update was released on October 6, 2022, and a completely critical update 23084122 – released on March 5, 2024.
Why is it important? (Except, of course, if you work at SDEK). Because an equally critical update for ESXi 7.0 (23794027) was released on May 21, for vCenter 7 and 8
(don't forget to indicate that the author, due to the fact that the stupid pickup and neural network does not distinguish between spare and auxiliary engines, ESXi and vCenter)
Updates released on June 17, 2024 24026615 (for 7), 24005165 (for 8.0.1) and one more thing.
There are no updates for vCenter 6.5 and 6.7, so if anyone hasn't read it yet for some reason Product Interoperability Matrix – which is complex, inconvenient, and not in Russian, then they don't need to read the text below.
To properly demonstrate that vCenter 7 supports ESXi 6.5, you need to select VMware vCenter Server 7 in the first drop-down list (Compare), but not select Version, and select VMware ESXi in the second list (With). And also do not choose Version.
Then it turns out that VMware vCenter Server 7.0U3 supports ESXi 6.7 U3 and even 6.5 U3. So, citizens, at least grab VMware vCenter Server 7.0U3 and update it, since you can't buy it. Although I am against piracy!
The latest VMware vCenter Server 8.0 U3 also supports ESXi 6.7 U3.
Although it no longer supports 6.5 U3
Read and build vSphere 7 Upgrade Activity Path can be found here.
You don’t have much time to migrate first to version 7, then to version 8 of vCenter – support for 7.0 will end on April 2, 2025.
The transition will be difficult because:
What Broadcom broke in May and June 2024
At the beginning of May, I, like many of my friends, received a letter with unpleasant news –
Your VMware support account will stop working on May 6, 2024.
Please take action now. You must activate your Broadcom support account and update your profile information before you can access the Broadcom Support Portal.
Of course, I took action, but still in May and June this entire Broadcom Support Portal worked very poorly.
Moved:
VMware Flings – now VMware by Broadcom Flings and is now located on https://community.broadcom.com/vmware-code
VMware Learning Platform Portal moved to the Learning@Broadcom platform
Vmware kb moved with a change in links, but not entirely – for example, Build numbers and versions of VMware ESXi/ESX instead
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2143832
became
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=2143832
The hint database is available for free. Not yet – because in many places this is no longer the case.
VMware Compatibility Guide lies where he lay
vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) ReadyNode Configurator in place, if only someone could read it.
vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) also exists at the old address.
vSAN IO (where you can check your RAID, HDD, SSD, Network for free not only by brand, but also by firmware) – hidden so that you can’t find it right away.
To find it, you need to know that it exists, because selecting in What are you looking for: vSAN is not enough, you also need to select I/O Device Compatibility Guide in Compatibility Guides
Good news.
The Release Notes and documentation database has not yet moved – it is still at its usual https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/index.html
A great help for those who can read and can find MD5 in the text, or can even compare the MD5 of the original and the MD5 of the captured zip.
Bad news.
Old versions of ESXi and vCenter were removed from the official website (or not?) (the latest versions of each branch are visible, but more on that below), and new versions of ISO were locked and hidden behind GeoIP. But that would be half the trouble, the website was also twisted so much that it became almost impossible to find anything in the search.
Previously it was possible from the page vSphere Hypervisor – Install & Configure fail in choosing a version, but now it’s gone.
Page Download the ESXi Installer leads to instructions 142814 – For product download instructions, see Download Broadcom products and software. The instructions are in pictures, maybe it will help someone. I don't.
Instructions 368772 Download VMware vSphere (VMware vSphere ESXi & VMware vCenter Server) again leads to instructions 142814 Download Broadcom products and software
Broadcom is a bit of a spy – if you disable cross-site cookies and trackers in your browser, an error will appear – Error: Cookies Disabled. Cookies are enabled though.
But, after pressing the buttons a little randomly, you can find the VMware Cloud Foundation section in My Downloads, find VMware vSphere on the second page, go to the group (on the right) VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) and there you will find everything you need to check captured ISOs –
6.5 – ESXi 6.5 EP 15 (Update 3a)
File: VMware-VMvisor-Installer-201908001-14320405.x86_64.iso
Build Number: 14320405
SHA256: c9850827ab0305818d79a5aac4164d4feab47e9c685765c0758670f443e336c6
MD5: 9c4c659b2e90b8eeffe74d08270b4170
6.7 – ESXi 6.7 P01 (Update 3b)
File: VMware-VMvisor-Installer-201912001-15160138.x86_64.iso
Build Number: 15160138
SHA256: 7665f662ab4f821c8a5c918d0e14e2919828f88611072716cc5581a15fa8c13a
MD5: 562178fbcf2e582f116a874c358697de
7.0 U3n – ESXi 7.0 U3 EP10
File: VMware-VMvisor-Installer-7.0U3n-21930508.x86_64.iso
Build Number: 21930508
SHA256: b5e65fc738900296dd70d1938d76ebb72dab19b9b722dedad445669fc77f1272
MD5: 0cacd44568b7f6112c6d003ef210dcfe
8.0 U3 – ESXi 8.0 U3
File: VMware-VMvisor-Installer-8.0U3-24022510.x86_64.iso
Build Number: 24022510
SHA256: 05ce214069a3e23265881fbd7a949fb93a99aa13059c6cac31920196e97ba4a1
MD5: 3697929d94704ac495247cd3fcf1c4eb
At this point, the neural network says goodbye to you and goes to watch the new season of the Cryptans series.
In this season:
First episode: cryptans are outraged that bots come to them to advertise crypt.
Second episode: cryptans are outraged by the behavior of the crypto chat administration, which is applying repression against them!
They shout and are indignant that they were repressed!
Stay tuned!
The series, I must say, is rather boring. Perhaps I will follow the advice of one cat and watch something more interesting – Salvation, with its On the third day God created the Remington And the name of the star is called Wormwood
P.S. How else can I do it so that accounts registered “yesterday” don’t spam me in private messages, like @AnnaVinkler, @gusar_realniy, @sergeyjacobs
