virtuallyGhetto

William Lam

vGhetto Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment 

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While working on my Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blog series awhile back, one of the things I was also working on was some automation to help build out the required infrastructure NSX-T (Manager, Controller & Edge), Nested ESXi hosts configured with VSAN for the Compute vSphere Cluster and Pivotal Ops Manager. This was not only useful for my own learning purposes, but that I could easily rebuild my lab if I had messed something up and allowed me to focus more on the PKS solution rather than standing up the infrastructure itself.

To be honest, I had about 95% of the script done but I was not able to figure out one of the NSX-T APIs and I got busy and had left the script on the back burner. This past weekend while cleaning out some of my PKS research documents, I came across the script and funny enough, in about 30minutes I was able to solve the problem which I was stuck for weeks prior. I just finished putting the final touches on the script along with adding some documentation. Simliar to my other vGhetto Lab Automation scripts, I have created a Github repo vGhetto Automated PKS Lab Deployment

UPDATE (06/19/18) - I have just updated the script to also include the deployment and configuration of the PKS components (Ops Manager, BOSH Director, Harbor & Stemcell). The script by default will now configure everything end-2-end and you will have a fully functional PKS environment that you can start playing around with. For complete details, please see the Github repo which has the updated requirements and documentation. Below is a screenshot of the PKS deployment and configuration which requires the use of the Ops Manager CLI (OM).


The script will deploy the following components which will be placed inside of a vApp as shown in the screenshot below:

  • NSX-T Manager
  • NSX-T Controller x 3 (though you technically only need one for lab/poc purposes)
  • NSX-T Edge
  • Nested ESXi VMs x 3 (VSAN will be configured)
  • Ops Manager


The script follows my PKS blog series and automates Part 3 (NSX-T) and the start of Part 4 (Ops Manager deploy), please refer to these individual blog posts for more information. The goal of the script is to enable folks to jump right into the PKS configuration workflows and not have to worry about setting up the actual infrastructure that is needed for PKS. Once the script has finished, you can jump right into Ops Manager and start your PKS journey.

Here is a sample execution of the script which took ~29 minutes to complete.


The full requirements for using the script be found on the Github repo and below are the software versions that I had used to deploy and configure PKS:

Feedback on default behavior for VM Storage Policy

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Today, the vCenter REST (vSphere Automation) APIs currently does not support the use of VM Storage Policies when relocating (vMotion, Cross Datacenter vMotion & Storage vMotion) or cloning an existing Virtual Machine. Customers have provided feedback that this is something that they would like to see get added to the current REST APIs and while this is being looked at, there were a couple of open questions from Engineering.

The following 2-question survey below is to help us understand what the "default" behavior should be when a Virtual Machine is being relocated or cloned within a vCenter Server and a VM Storage Policy is NOT specified when using the APIs. The reason for this is that our existing APIs for relocate and clone today are very flexible and not everything needs to be specified as part of the relocate or clone API specification. However, due to this flexibility, you may observe different behaviors and we would like to understand what the default behavior should be when some of these paraemters are not specified. In the case where you want to be explicit, you can always specify the VM Storage Policy, but the survey is to understand when it is not specified.

Survey: https://goo.gl/forms/aQjVTly2MmVHeRsp1

Thank you  for taking the time to provide your feedback, this will help us build an easy and robust API when dealing with relocate and clone operations using the vCenter REST APIs.

How do you “log a reason” using PowerCLI when rebooting or shutting down ESXi host?

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I am sure many of you have seen this UI prompt asking you to specify a reason before issuing a reboot or shutdown of an ESXi host and I assume most of you spend a few seconds to type in a useful message and not just random characters, right? 😉


Have you ever tried performing the same reboot or shutdown operation using the vSphere API or PowerCLI (which leverages the API)? Have noticed, there is not a way to specify a message like you can in the UI?

Here is a table of the PowerCLI cmdlets and the respective vSphere API that is used to perform these two operations:

Operation Cmdlet vSphere API
Reboot  Restart-VMHost  RebootHost_Task
Shutdown  Stop-VMHost  ShutdownHost_Task

When looking at either the PowerCLI and/or vSphere API documentation, we can confirm that there are no fields to specify a message which can lead to an assumption that this is simply not possible or that the functionality might be provided by a private API. Fortunately, this is not the case and the functionality is in fact in the public vSphere API and has been for quite some time.

When you specify a message prior to rebooting or shutting down, this message is actually persisted and implemented as an Event within vCenter Server as shown in the screenshot below.

Instead of being able to specify a message that is only applicable to an ESXi host, I believe the original vSphere API designers thought that this functionality could also be useful and applied more broadly across any number of the vSphere Inventory objects, not just ESXi hosts. As such, this functionality which the vSphere UI uses is provided by the LogUserEvent() method which is part of the EventManager API. Customers or solutions can leverage this mechanism to log custom user defined events which is then persisted with the lifecycle fo the vSphere Inventory Object or as far back as your retention period for vCenter Server Events.

Going back to our original question, if you want to specify a message prior to rebooting or shutting down an ESXi host, the following snippet below demonstrates the use of the vSphere API via PowerCLI:

Quick Tip – OVFTool 4.3 now supports vCPU & memory customization during deployment

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In addition to adding vSphere 6.7 support and a few security enhancements (more details in the release notes), the latest OVFTool 4.3 release has also been enhanced to support customizing either vCPU and/or Memory from the default configurations when deploying an OVF/OVA.

Historically, it was only possible to modify these values if you were deploying to a vCloud Director endpoint using either --numberOfCpus or --memorySize. When deploying to a vSphere endpoint, these settings were not applicable and users would need to perform an additional operation calling into the vSphere API using whatever automation tool of choice to reconfigure the VM after deployment. It was not the end of the world but also not ideal if you simply wanted to make a minor modification to the default OVF/OVA you were deploying. I definitely ran into this a few times where having this functionality would have been very useful and I know number of customers have also shared simliar feedback in the past.

I had asked whether it was possible to support this use case and it looks like we already had an internal feature request added to the OVFTool backlog and with some additional customer feedback, we were also able to get this enhancement added to the latest release.

The existing --numberOfCpus and --memorySize accepts a VM Identifier (usually the name) followed by the value, for example

--numberOfCpus:Foo=4

The VM Identifier is to help with vApp deployments where you may have an OVF/OVA which is composed of multiple VMs of which you would like to customize each VM with different values. To ensure we do not break backwards compatibility, this pattern has also been extended when deploying to a vSphere endpoint. Having said that, most customers that I have talked to who use OVFTool generally deploy an OVF/OVA that is comprised of a single VM. In this case, rather than specifying the name of the VM again which is derived from --name property, you can simply use the wildcard asterisk (*) to simply apply it to all VMs within the OVF/OVA.

Here is an example of deploying a PhotonOS OVA which is configured with a default of 1 vCPU and 2GB memory and as part of our deployment using OVFTool, we will increase both vCPU to 2 and memory to 4GB:

ovftool --acceptAllEulas --name=Foo --numberOfCpus:'*'=2 --memorySize:'*'=4096 photon-custom-hw11-2.0-304b817.ova 'vi://administrator@vsphere.lo[email protected]/VSAN-Datacenter/host/VSAN-Cluster'

How to simulate Persistent Memory (PMem) in vSphere 6.7 for educational purposes? 

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A really cool new capability that was introduced in vSphere 6.7 is the support for the extremely fast memory technology known as non-volatile memory (NVM), also known as persistent memory (PMem). Customers can now benefit from the high data transfer rate of volatile memory with the persistence and resiliency of traditional storage. As of this blog post, both Dell and HP have Persistent Memory support and you can see the list of supported devices and systems here and here.


PMem can be consumed in one of two methods:

  • Virtual PMem (vPMem) - In this mode, the GuestOS is actually PMem-aware and can consume the physical PMem device on the ESXi host as standard, byte-addressable memory. In addition to using an OS that supports PMem, you will also need to ensure that the VM is running the latest Virtual Hardware 14
  • Virtual PMem Disks (vPMemDisk) - In this mode, the GuestOS is NOT PMem-aware and does not have access to the physical PMem device. Instead, a new virtual PMem hard disk can be created and attached to a VM. To ensure the PMem hard disk is placed on the PMem Datastore as part of this workflow, a new PMem VM Storage Policy will be applied automatically. There are no additional GuestOS or VM Virtual Hardware requirement for this scenario, this is great for legacy OS that are not PMem-aware

Customers who may want to familiarize themselves with these new PMem workflows, especially for Automation or educational purposes, could definitely benefit from the ability to simulate PMem in their vSphere environment prior to obtaining a physical PMem device. Fortunately, this is something you can actually do if you have some additional spare memory from your physical ESXi host.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Unlike a real physical PMem device where your data will be persisted upon a reboot, the simulated method will NOT persist your data. Please use this at your own risk and do not place important or critical VMs using this method.

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Quick Tip – What hashing algorithm is supported for ESXi Kickstart password?

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I had a question the other day asking whether the encrypted password which can be specified within an ESXi Kickstart file (denoted by the --isencrypted flag) can use a different hashing algorithm other than MD5? The answer is absolutely yes. In fact, MD5 as a default hashing algorithm has NOT been used for a number of releases, probably dating back to classic ESX (you know, the version that had the Service Console).

For all recent releases of ESXi including 5.5 to 6.7, the default hashing algorithm has been SHA512 for quite some time now. Below are two ways in which you can check which default hashing algorithm is currently being used:

Option 1 - SSH to ESXi host and take a look at /etc/pam.d/passwd


Option 2 - SSH to ESXi host and take a look at /etc/shadow and look at the field prior to the salt.

As a reference:

  • $1$ - MD5
  • $5$ - SHA256
  • $6$ - SHA512