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Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 2

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In the previous article, we reviewed the concepts and basic approach to building your own VMware Virtual Appliance (OVF/OVA). In Part 2, we are now going to take a look at a reference implementation for building a Linux VA using VMware PhotonOS. Although I am using PhotonOS as the guest, you can apply these same techniques to any other Linux distribution of your choice.

Step 1 - Create a new VM in vCenter Server and then install PhotonOS using the ISO format. 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 6 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


Step 4 - Power back on the VM and once it is available on the network (assuming DHCP), download and copy the sample first boot script rc.local to /etc/rc.d/rc.local. This script is where all the magic happens and will process the OVF property input and then configure the network settings. Right now it assumes these fields are optional, meaning if they 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.

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ESXi Native Driver for USB NIC Fling

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Today, I am very excited to announce a new Fling that I have been working on which is a Native Driver for ESXi that will enable support for three of the most popular USB network adapter chipsets found in the market today. The ASIX USB 2.0 gigabit network ASIX88178a, ASIX USB 3.0 gigabit network ASIX88179 & the Realtek USB 3.0 gigabit network RTL8153. This effort had initially started back in 2016 as a side project with Songtao, a VMware Engineer who works on our USB stack for ESXi. Based on the enormous amount of feedback from the community as well customer Production use cases, this side project evolved into the development of a full fledge Native Driver for ESXi.

This Fling is more than just adding additional network interfaces for vSphere Home Labs, which is definitely a use case, but it is also about enabling new and future computing platforms that may not always have the traditional network connectivity that we have come to expect. Today, ESXi supports a number of high-end network controllers (10G/40G/100G) designed for Enterprise Data Centers that include advanced networking & low latency features. As more & more workloads appear at the Edge like IoT, point-of-sales & remote office use cases, the traditional networking solutions may no longer meet the needs of these new infrastructures.

For Edge computing environments, reducing the cost & power consumption is definitely one of the driving factors. However, with some of these platforms, their form factors can make it difficult or impossible to support traditional high-end network controllers. Luckily, there are a number of options for network adapters in the market but is can also be difficult to support them all.

USB has become one the most widely adopted connection type in the world & USB network adapters are also popular amongst Edge computing platforms. In some platforms, there is either limited or no PCI/PCIe slots for I/O expansion & in some cases, an Ethernet port is not even available. This Fling will hopefully help enable some of these Edge use cases today and with the help of the community and feedback, we can see how this can be enhanced or evolved over time including where it could even be part of the ESXi distribution.

Another use case for USB-based network adapters as mentioned earlier are for vSphere Home Labs, platforms like the Intel NUC or Apple Mac Mini have limited number of built-in Ethernet ports, but plenty of USB & USB-C ports which can enable these platforms with additional networking capabilities. These systems could also be potential Edge platform candidates given the right connectivity.

For download and instructions, please visit https://labs.vmware.com/flings/usb-network-native-driver-for-esxi

Creating vCenter Alarms based on Task Events such as Folder creation

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The vCenter Server Events sub-system is an incredibly rich and powerful interface that enables customers to monitor, alert and even trigger additional actions based on a particular event. One such example that I have written about before is to key off of a VM provisioned event and automatically apply security hardening settings when the VM is created or cloned. This can be useful if customers are not taking advantage of VM Templates or if a VI Admins manually creates a VM from scratch, you can still ensure you have a compliant VM deployment through the use of Automation. You can either poll for the VM created event and then execute a script as shown in this example or you can automatically trigger a remote action by generating an SNMP trap when the event actually occurs.

The possibilities are truly endless on what you can do with vCenter Events and for the complete list of all Event types, you can refer to the vSphere API documentation here. One thing to be aware of is that not every operation within vCenter Server generates an Event, one example of this is when a Folder object is created or deleted. You can use vCenter Server Tasks sub-system to query for this info but there is not a respective vCenter Event that you can key off of to generate an Alarm for example. This was something I had noticed myself and assumed it was a limitation of the platform or feature teams that publish VC Events.

Recently, this question came up again from a customer who was looking for a way to trigger an alarm every time a VM Folder was created. I took another look at this and came to learn about a more generic type of Event that can be used to create an Alarm for such use cases where a native VC Event may not exists called a Task Event.

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Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 1

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This has been a topic I have been wanting to write about for quite some time, especially as I get asked about this on fairly regular basis from both partners and customers. I normally point folks over to our official Virtual Appliance (VA) authoring tool, VMware Studio which includes a number of development resources to help get started. Studio is used by many of our partners when creating their VA offerings, although it may not be the easiest thing to get started with, it does provide a complete end-to-end solution.

Most recently, I found myself building out a couple of VAs for my own day to day use, including a custom PhotonOS OVA that allows me to configure a static network address during deployment through the use of custom OVF properties. The official PhotonOS OVA that VMware ships does not provide this option and automatically defaults to DHCP. If you want to setup a static IP Address, you would need to first deploy the VM and then login to the console or SSH (if you have DHCP enabled) and then manually update the networking settings.


For my use case, Studio was going to be overkill and not to mention it may not even support PhotonOS or other modern OSes in general. However, everything that is needed to build your own VA is actually available right in vCenter Server. This was the perfect opportunity and excuse for me to finally document *my* process, in case it can help others wanting to do the same, especially for a home lab setup. In Part 1, I will take you through the two important concepts of building your own VA and then in Part 2 and Part 3, we will take a look at building both a Linux and Windows VA. I will also publish a reference Linux and Windows implementation so that you can use that as a basis to build your own VA, which is not limited to just Linux or Windows, it can be ANY GuestOS that vSphere supports.

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Quick Tip – Import OVF/OVA as VM Template using OVFTool 4.3 Update 1

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OVFTool is an extremely versatile command-line utility for importing and exporting Virtual Machines to and from the OVF/OVA format and it supports a number of VMware platforms including VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), vSphere (vCenter Server and ESXi), Fusion, Workstation, Player and even vCloud Director (vCD).

An infrequent asks that I have seen from customers is the ability to deploy an OVF/OVA as a VM Template rather than just a Virtual Machine in a vSphere-based environment. OVFTool has had the ability to deploy to vAppTemplate for vCD-based environments, so it would make sense to also support vCenter Server VM Templates as well. Today, the workflow is a two-step process, deploy the OVF/OVA and then use the vSphere API to convert the VM to a VM Template.

With the latest OVFTool 4.3 Update 1 which was a minor release last year, we now have a new parameter called importAsTemplate which will allow customers to easily import an OVF/OVA directly into as a VM Template. Below is a quick sample using this new option and I am deploying to a VMC-based environment (see this article for requirements when using OVFTool with VMC)

Once the upload has completed, we can take a look at our vSphere UI and see that our imported OVA been automatically been converted to a VM Template!

GPU Passthrough of Radeon RX Vega M in Intel Hades Canyon

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With the latest Intel Hades Canyon now being able to run ESXi, a number of folks have been interested in taking advantage of the integrated GPU that is included in the system. There are two models of the Hades Canyon, NUC8i7HNK which is the lower end system with Radeon RX Vega M and the NUC8i7HVK which is the higher end system with Radeon RX Vega GH. One of the first thing I had attempted after getting ESXi working on the Hades Canyon was to try to enable passthrough of the iGPU into a Windows GuestOS but in all my attempts, it resulted into a PSOD'ing the ESXi host once you start installing the AMD Drivers from Intel.

A few days ago, one of my readers, Chris78 shared an update where he was able to prevent the ESXi host from PSOD'ing by adding a VM Advanced Setting but he he was still having issues where the Windows GuestOS would now BSOD. This sounded promising, I figure it would not hurt to gave it a try and to my surprise, I was able to successfully passthrough the iGPU to a Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 and 2019 system from my limited testing. After reporting the success back to Chris78 who was still having issues even after using the settings I had used, his conclusion was there may be a difference between the HNK and HVK models, with the latter having BSOD issues. For now, it seems like iGPU can only be passthrough if you have the NUC8i7HNK model.

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