Automation

Instant Clone Apple MacOS

03/28/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

Whether you are a brand new startup working on the next hot mobile app or an established Enterprise or Consumer brand company, development and testing of Apple iOS and/or MacOS is simply a reality in todays world. The vast majority of these customers accomplish this by running Apple MacOS on vSphere, either within their own on-premises datacenter or leveraging MacStadium, the largest MacOS Cloud hosting provider, who also runs their Mac infrastructure using VMware vSphere.

The ability to quickly build/test and deploy your application (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) can mean the difference of having an edge over you competitor or being able to keep up with the demands of your business. Many customers have benefited from using vSphere platform and with technologies like Linked Clones, which allows you to quickly spin up a new VM without having to perform a complete full clone, it means you can build and test your application even faster.

In vSphere 6.7, we introduced a major enhancement to Instant Clone, which you can read more about here and here. One of the questions I have been seeing lately is whether Instant Clone can be applied to MacOS guests? The answer is absolutely! In fact, Matt Moriarity, who works for TravisCI, recently shared some tidbits on how to get a MacOS Mojave guests to see the updated MAC Address to ensure that there are no network conflicts when performing an Instant Clone.

The majority of the "hard" work to use Instant Clone is really from within the GuestOS and the customization script that needs to be developed. In fact, Instant Clone is pretty OS agnostics and you can even Instant Clone Microsoft Windows 98 and 2000, if you really wanted to 😀

ESXTOP and VMware Cloud on AWS

03/26/2019 by William Lam 6 Comments

ESXTOP is one of the most versatile and popular tool in the VI Administrators tool belt when it comes to real time performance analysis and data collection in a vSphere environment. In fact, ESXTOP also came up in the most recent episode of the VirtuallySpeaking Podcast covering the Top 10 Tools for VI Administrators, which Duncan Epping and I had the pleasure to be part of.

To use ESXTOP, you are required to SSH to an ESXi host as it is only available in the ESXi Shell. Traditionally, this has not been a huge issue for on-premises environment, especially as you can enable access when you needed to run ESXTOP. However, when operating on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), customers no longer have to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure and can now focus on being a consumer of the VMware SDDC. One side affect of this operational change is that customers do not have direct access to ESXi and would not be able to use ESXTOP.

Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 3

03/19/2019 by William Lam 3 Comments

To conclude this three-part blog series, we are now going take a look at reference implementation for building your own Microsoft Windows Virtual Appliance (VA). Similar to the Linux VA build, the Windows OVA will also support the ability to customize basic networking configuration including the use of a static or DHCP option.

In addition, to demonstrate the endless possibilities for building your own VA, I have also included an option to automatically join a Microsoft Active Directory Domain as part of the OVA deployment, which is a fairly common operation after deploying a Windows-based system. In the example below, I am using Windows Server 2016 and PowerShell to perform all the required automation.

Step 1 - Create a new VM in vCenter Server and then install Window Server 2016 using the ISO. Once you have completed the OS installation, you may want to apply any patches or packages that you want included as part of your VA. Once that is done, go ahead and shut down the VM.

Step 2 - Select the VM in the vSphere Inventory and then click on Configure->vApp and then check the Enable vApp Options. Once enabled, select OVF environment for the IP allocation scheme. In the OVF Details tab, select VMware Tools for the OVF environment transport. (Optionally) You can specify some additional metadata including appliance name and URLs to help others who maybe consuming your VA once it has been exported to an OVF/OVA.

Step 3 - Next, add the following 9 OVF properties which will be used as input to configure networking within PhotonOS. Click Add and provide a Label, Key and optional Category.

Label	Key	Category
Hostname	guestinfo.hostname	Networking
IP Address	guestinfo.ipaddress	Networking
Netmask	guestinfo.netmask	Networking
Gateway	guestinfo.gateway	Networking
DNS Server	guestinfo.dns	Networking
DNS Domain	guestinfo.domain	Networking
AD Domain	guestinfo.ad_domain	Active Directory
AD Username	guestinfo.ad_username	Active Directory
AD Password	guestinfo.ad_password	Active Directory

Step 3 - Power back on the VM and once it is available on the network (assuming DHCP), download and copy the sample first boot script customize-guest.ps1 to C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop. This script is where all the magic happens and will process the OVF property input and then configure the network settings and if specified, it will also perform the Active Directory domain join. Right now it assumes the networking fields are optional, meaning if they are left blank, it will default the system to DHCP. If you provide all input properties, then it will go ahead and configure a static network address.

vSphere Tag Attach/Detach events now in VMware Cloud on AWS

03/05/2019 by William Lam 2 Comments

The underlying products (vSphere, vSAN & NSX) that run within VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) are constantly being improved with new capabilities and enhancements. As a service, VMC is updated more frequently than a traditional on-premise environment and one huge benefit for our customers is that they get to access all the latest and greatest features of the platform!

Yesterday, I came to learn about some improvements that we had made to our vSphere Tagging infrastructure to start publishing vCenter Server Events for when a vSphere Tag is attached or detached from an inventory object such as a Virtual Machine. This has been a frequently requested feature by our customers, especially for auditing purposes and this also enables the ability to perform additional actions through the use of a vCenter Alarm.

In the vSphere UI for a VMC vCenter Server, you can now see these new tagging events by selecting the vCenter Server inventory object and then go to Monitor->Events and filter by "attached tag" or "detached tag".

Automating complete HCX deployment and configuration to first cloud migration using PowerCLI

03/04/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

PowerCLI 11.2.0, was just released last week and for a "dot" release, it includes a number of new capabilities and enhancements. One of the most exciting features for me personally was the introduction of the VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) PowerCLI module which I also had the pleasure of working on and providing early feedback to the HCX Engineering team. The new HCX module enables customers to use PowerCLI to now easily automate the HCX Fleet deployment (Interconnect, WAN Optimization and Network Extension) as well as perform bulk live migrations of workloads between two HCX-enabled environments, with on-premises vSphere to VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) being the most popular.

I have written a number articles on HCX Automation using both the HCX REST API and PowerCLI and with this latest PowerCLI module, I realized that we now have complete end-to-end automation with PowerCLI from the HCX OVA deployment to initial configuration and fleet deployment to your very first HCX vMotion! This is quite exciting as I know a number of folks have been asking about automating the fleet deployment, especially for enabling quick proof of concepts and quickly showing the value of HCX to our customers for moving large amount of workloads without any downtime.

Below, you will find a breakdown of the HCX setup which I have split into three sections, each section includes the respective PowerCLI sample code that can easily be adapted to your own environment. I look forward to seeing what customers do with the new HCX PowerCLI module and if you have any feedback, be sure to leave a comment or better yet, file a feature enhancement using the PowerCLI Feature Request Tool.

Running sk8s (Simple Kubernetes) on VMC with an AWS Elastic Load Balancer

02/27/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Last week I wrote about a really nifty Virtual Appliance called sk8s which can be used to quickly setup a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster for development and testing purposes. If you have not checked out that article, be sure to give that a read first to get the full context. As mentioned in the previous article, sk8s runs great on any vSphere deployment but it can also run on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which adds an additional capability where an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) can automatically be provisioned and configured to front-end the k8s control plane as part of the deployment for external access.

The nice benefit of this is that you only need to configure access to the ELB and not directly to the underlying VMs running within the SDDC, both simplifying the setup but also reducing the need to expose the VMs directly to the internet. The write-up below is similar to that of the previous article, but it does expand into greater detail when deploying to VMC and all the required configuration changes within the VPC using the AWS Console and the Network and Security changes using the VMC Console.

Note: If you decide to use the integrated AWS ELB integration, please be aware that you will be charged for the consumption. For pricing, please see the AWS documentation here.

Prerequisites:

Access to the VMC Console and VMC SDDC
NSX-T Logical Network with DHCP enabled
AWS Access & Secret Key for automatically creating ELB (Optional)
govc

Step 1 - Install govc on your local desktop which has access to your VMC vSphere environment. If you have not installed govc, the quickest way is to simply download the latest binary, below is an example of installing the latest MacOS version:

curl -L https://github.com/vmware/govmomi/releases/download/v0.20.0/govc_darwin_amd64.gz | gunzip > /usr/local/bin/govc
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/govc

Step 2 - We need to verify a few settings in the AWS Console to ensure that the VPC that is connected to your SDDC is properly configured so that the provisioning of the ELB will be successful.