William Lam

VMware Community Homelabs Project

02/11/2020 by William Lam 2 Comments

On a weekly basis, I easily get at least half a dozen inquires ranging from our customers, partners and even internal VMware employees on the topic of VMware Homelabs. The most common requests I receive is whether hardware X will work and whether I have tried it to recommended known build-of-materials (BOM). Funny enough, just last week I was asked to review our CTO's (Greg Lavender) BOM as he was also interested in building his own personal VMware homelab which goes to show just how popular this topic really is 😊

Although I have written a TON of content regarding VMware Homelabs, I definitely can not cover every single permutation. Having seen so many awesome VMware Homelabs over the years from the VMware Community, why not leverage the power of our community to crowdsource all the different homelab configurations into a single location which can then be shared with the rest of the community? This idea was kicked off about two weeks ago and I have put together a simple Google Form which you can find the link below to submit your information.

Submit VMware Community Homelab: https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/homelab

As of writing this blog post today, I have received a total of 48 valid submissions (there were a handful that had invalid URLs and/or did not follow directions and published a publicly accessible URL to their homelab BOM which I had to remove from the submission). The submissions have been pretty interesting to see and just how different each homelab is, especially from a cost perspective ranging from $800 up to $150,000 🤯At that price, this is a full blown datacenter and I am sure folks have an ideas on who owns those labs (hint, its not me 😉). I want to thank everyone who has submitted to the project and help get the word out, hopefully we will see even more submissions in 2020! The results have been pretty interesting and it is great to see how different each homelab is, especially on the price

For now, you can view the complete results in the short URL below and periodically I will process any additional submissions and publish them to the Github repo.

VMware Community Homelab Results: http://vmwa.re/homelab

How to exclude VCSA UI/CLI Installer from MacOS Catalina Security Gatekeeper?

02/08/2020 by William Lam 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago I had upgraded my personal home computer to the latest MacOS Catalina (10.15) and one of the first issues I ran into was being able to access my vCenter Server. It turned out this was due to changes to MacOS security (which is a good thing) but certainly caught me and others off guard. In fact, I spent quite some time searching online and eventually found this workaround here.

After sharing this tidbit online (which several others also ran into) I came to learn that both Duncan Epping blogged about this issue back in Nov 2019 here and Christian Mohn blogged about this in Dec 2019 here. Sadly I did not come across either of their blogs using "NET::ERR_CERT_REVOKED macos catalina" in Google. I had assumed this was a Chrome issue and simply landed on the first few links and looking back, I now see Duncan's blog was #6 in the search results (doh!)

Today, I ran into another issue when attempting to use the VCSA CLI Installer, the following error was thrown:

“vcsa-deploy.bin” cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified

This is again due to a security change in MacOS Catalina which now prevents terminal-based applications which are not notarized from running. For a single application/binary, you can go into System Preferences->Security & Privacy and allow anyway. For more complex applications like the VCSA CLI Installer which has a number of libraries and scripts, this will take awhile and end up frustrating end users. The updated security enhancement is actually a good thing and I did not want to disable the Gatekeeper service but I was interested in disabling it for the VCSA CLI Installer. While searching online, I came across this Hashicorp Terraform thread where folks were having the exact same issue and I found out there was a way to disable the MacOS Security Gatekeeper for a specific application.

To do so, we just need to recursively remove the metadata attribute "com.apple.quarantine" for the extracted VCSA ISO by running the following command:

sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine VMware-VCSA-all-6.7.0-Update-15132721

After the quarantine attribute has been removed, you can now run the VCSA CLI Installer (including UI Installer) without being prompted with an error. Hopefully VMware will consider notarizing future releases of the VCSA Installer and I will be sharing this feedback internally if it has not already.

Using PowerCLI to automate the retrieval of VCSA Password Policies

02/06/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

I hope that every vSphere administrator or operator by now is familiar with the extremely powerful vSphere Guest Operations API functionality (details here and here), which can easily be consumed using PowerCLI's Invoke-VMScript cmdlet. If not, highly recommend you check out the links referenced. I know the GuestOps API is certainly my top favorite with sending VM keystrokes capability a very close second!

Not only does the GuestOps API unlock functionality that simply may not be possible (e.g. there's no API or automation interface) but it also enables automation within a VM without requiring any type of remote management services enabled (e.g. SSH or WinRM) or even networking to the VM for that matter!

The reason I am bringing all this up is that although there is not an API for managing and retrieving vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) configurations which includes password policies, there is a way in which customers can still automate and retrieve this and other information by leveraging the GuestOps API. In fact, back in 2015 I demonstrated on how you can retrieve VCSA SSO password policy and configurations and we can simply apply the GuestOps API to help us automate this task. In addition, most customers do not enable SSH by default and we can still apply the GuestOps API technique and perform automation tasks to VSCSA without requiring SSH as described in this blog post back in 2016.

Workspace One Access (vIDM) Powershell Module to automate creating 3rd Party Identity Provider

02/05/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

One of the projects I am currently working on involves Workspace One Access (formally VMware Identity Manager) and configuring a 3rd Party Identity Provider for Identity Federation. As with anything, using the UI for the first time to validate the workflow is perfectly fine for me but after that, I normally prefer to automate, especially as I was rebuilding this particular setup a few times. I saw that Workspace One Access (WSO Access) had a REST API but I was surprised that there were no APIs for actually managing the configurations.

I figured before giving up, I should see at least see how the UI was performing these operations as "some API" should exists and started up one of my favorite browser tools Chrome Developer Console to inspect the HTTP requests. I came to learn there were an additional set of "Jersey" APIs (no background on the Jersey name, but its part of the API URI) that might do exactly what I was looking for. After a bit of trial/error, I was able to fully automate the creation of both a WSO Access Directory as well as 3rd Party Identity Provider.

Decoding Intel NUC “Canyon” Generation with CPU “Lake” Generation Codenames

01/28/2020 by William Lam 9 Comments

Swift Canyon, Baby Canyon, Bean Canyon, Provo Canyon, Kaby Lake, Whiskey Lake, Coffee Lake ... these are just some of the Intel codenames that either refer to a NUC platform or CPU generation. I can understand the need for codenames, however for consumers, the various names are often confusing and being able to grok at which system is the "latest" is not always trivial. In some cases there are multiple updates to different generations of the platform all happening within a short period of time and most online sites may swap between codenames and the official "Nth" generation nomenclature.

I have been working with the Intel NUC platform from a VMware standpoint since the 6th Generation back in 2016 and even I still get confused at times on what is the latest "Canyon" NUCs and their respective "Lake" CPU generations. I can not imagine how complicated this might feel for some of our customers who are updating their VMware homelab every couple of years or someone who is just starting out for the first time. To not only help keep myself sane as I often get asked about Homelabs, literally on a weekly basis and to help educate others within out community, I have created a document which maps all Intel NUCs (full height) to their respective Nth generation along with the respective CPU architecture used in each platform.

Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling v3.1

01/22/2020 by William Lam 1 Comment

Here is a small update to the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling which includes a couple of commonly requested features along with some bug fixes.

What's New in v3.1

Support for disk format conversion between Thick (Lazy Zeroed), Thick (Eager Zeroed) and Thin provisioning
Support for VM rename pattern for Clone operation
Fixed duplicated network selection when performing bulk migration
Fixed startup failure when a new home vCenter is specified as a command line argument

vSphere HTML5 and Standalone UI Client Support

In our 3.0 release, we added support for a native vSphere HTML5 (H5) Client experience which leverages new remote plugin framework that was introduced in vSphere 6.7 Update 1 and enables customers who prefer to use the H5 Client for their day to day use to also take advantage of the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Tool directly from the same UI. However, the addition of this new consumption UI created some confusion as some folks assumed this was the only mechanism. As stated in the release notes, we support both the new H5 UI as well as the standalone UI which many customers have been using for quite some time.

I suspect the confusion was due to the new CLI syntax which now requires specifying a vCenter Server endpoint to register. It is true that if you wish to use the new H5 Client integration, you will need to have a vSphere 6.7 Update 1 environment and provide credentials to that "home" vCenter Server. However, if you do not wish to use the H5 Client and you wish to use the old standalone client, you simply omit the vCenter Server registration details and the standalone client will work. In fact, even if you decide to use the H5 Client UI, you can always use the standalone client as that is the actual backend of the system.

Option 1: vSphere H5 Client Plugin

The following command will register the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling plugin to the specified vCenter Server:

java -jar xvm-3.1.jar --vcenter.fqdn=VCENTER-IP-OR-FQDN --vcenter.user=ADMIN-USER --vcenter.pass=ADMIN-PASSWORD

You will need to logout and then log back in to see the plugin which is located under "Menu" as shown in the screenshot below.

Option 2: Standalone UI Client

The following command will start the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling in standalone mode:

java -jar xvm-3.1.jar

You can then access the standalone client by opening a browser to localhost and port specified (default is 8443). You can always access the plugin locally whether you are using Option 1 or 2.