linux

Packer reference for building PhotonOS Virtual Appliance using OVF properties

11/25/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

I was introduced to HashiCorp Packer several years back by Timo Tsugliani, who if you are not following on Twitter, you are missing a TON of really useful nuggets which this guys shares both VMware/IT related and cool stuff. I am constantly learning about new things things from Timo and this guys is just a wealth of knowledge if you get the chance to work with him. At the time, I had played with Packer for a bit but did not have an actual use case for it, so I mostly forgot about it.

Fast forward a few years later and with recent projects like the vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling, I have really spent time learning about Packer in greater depth and I now realize how powerful Packer is for building various artifacts including VMware-based templates that is not only easy but consistently from source control. It took me awhile to get to the aha moment but now I use Packer for so many different things to help simplify my life.

With the recent open sourcing of our VEBA Fling which includes the use of PhotonOS and Packer, I was reminded of a blog series that I did earlier on how to build your own Linux and/or Windows Virtual Appliance using OVF properties (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3). I realized it would have been useful to have an actual reference implementation on building a very simple PhotonOS Virtual Appliance that exercises some basic OVF properties so folks could quickly get started beyond the manual steps that were documented. I was also motivated by a chat I had with Luc Dekens (Godfather of PowerCLI) last week on some of the Automation he was trying to with PhotonOS and I figured this might be something he and others could also benefit from.

Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 2

02/19/2019 by William Lam 3 Comments

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.

How to install PowerCLI Core on Debian Linux?

01/04/2017 by William Lam 6 Comments

PowerCLI Core has been tried on two Linux distributions: VMware's Photon OS and Ubuntu 14.04, however that is not to say it would not work on other distros. In fact, .Net Core (which PowerCLI Core consumes) supports a variety of Linux distributions which can be found here. I recently needed to run PowerCLI Core on a Debian 8 system which required a few minor tweaks to get working. I figure I might as well document the steps in case this might help others wanting to use PowerCLI Core which now includes PowerNSX on a Debian system.

Step 1 - Append the following repo source to /etc/apt/sources.list configuration file:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian sid main

Step 2 - Run the following command to update the repo

apt-get update

Step 3 - Download .deb package for latest Powershell release and run the following command which will generate list of required dependencies:

wget https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v6.0.0-alpha.14/powershell_6.0.0-alpha.14-1ubuntu1.16.04.1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i powershell_6.0.0-alpha.14-1ubuntu1.16.04.1_amd64.deb

Step 4 - Run the following command to install powershell along with its dependencies:

apt-get -f install

Step 5 - The next series of commands will download and setup PowerCLI Core:

mkdir -p /powershell
wget https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/powerclicore/PowerCLI_Core.zip -O /powershell/PowerCLI.ViCore.zip
apt-get -y install unzip
unzip /powershell/PowerCLI.ViCore.zip -d /powershell
mkdir -p /root/.config/powershell/
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/powershell/Modules
unzip /powershell/PowerCLI.ViCore.zip -d ~/.local/share/powershell/Modules
unzip /powershell/PowerCLI.Vds.zip -d ~/.local/share/powershell/Modules
mv /powershell/Start-PowerCLI.ps1 /root/.config/powershell/Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

Step 6 (Optional) - Install PowerNSX module:

wget https://github.com/vmware/powernsx/archive/master.zip -O /powershell/master.zip
unzip /powershell/master.zip -d /powershell/
mkdir ~/.local/share/powershell/Modules/PowerNSX
cp /powershell/powernsx-master/PowerNSX.ps*1 ~/.local/share/powershell/Modules/PowerNSX/

If everything installed successfully, you should be able to now launch PowerCLI Core by simply typing "powershell"

‘System.Management.Automation.ConfigPropertyAccessor’ exception when launching PowerCLI Core in Linux firstboot script

01/03/2017 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Happy New Years everyone!

I just got back into the swing of things after taking some much needed time off over the holiday break. While catching up on my email, I also re-visited one of my pet projects I had been working on right before the break. I needed to launch a specific PowerCLI script upon firstboot from a Linux system, specifically PhotonOS leveraging PowerCLICore. My first few attempts had failed and in troubleshooting the issue further, I found the following cryptic error message in the system logs:

The shell cannot be started. A failure occurred during initialization:
The type initializer for 'System.Management.Automation.ConfigPropertyAccessor' threw an exception.

After a bit of Googling, I found the following Github PR which seems to indicate that the HOME environmental variable may not properly configured or readable by Powershell. The quick fix was to simply define the HOME directory within the shell script that starts up the PowerCLI script.

Below is a snippet of what I needed to add to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to automatically run my PowerCLI script:

export HOME=/root

/usr/bin/powershell -File /root/MyPowerCLI-Script.ps1

export HOME=/root

/usr/bin/powershell -File /root/MyPowerCLI-Script.ps1

The following command was also useful in troubleshooting and verifying that my PowerCLI script had properly executed since there was no output in my script log:

journalctl --no-pager | grep rc.local

VMware PowerCLI for Mac OS X, Linux & More? Yes, please!

09/06/2016 by William Lam 10 Comments

There were a several announcements at last weeks VMworld US Conference, but one of the most exciting piece of news in my opinion was from Alan Renouf, Product Manager for all things API/SDK/CLI at VMware. During Alan's What's New PowerCLI session, he announced that PowerCLI is finally coming to both Mac OS X as well as Linux! As you can imagine, the news was very well received from customers and partners. In fact, after I had tweeted the update here & here, I literally had folks pinging/IM'ing/DM'ing me non-stop about when they could get access 🙂

UPDATE (10/18/16) - PowerCLI Multi-Platform (MP) for Linux and Mac OS X has now been released as a VMware Fling. Please find the download here and provide any feedback in the comments section.

This exciting update was only possible with the help of our friends over at Microsoft who had recently open sourced both .NET Core & PowerShell. Once that news broke, Alan and the PowerCLI Engineering team have been working hard on porting over the existing PowerCLI code which uses the Windows .NET library over to the new .NET Core which is now open sourced. I have been very impressed at how fast the PowerCLI team have already made available many of the default cmdlets as well as the Get View cmdlet which exposes the entire functionality of the vSphere API.

Now, before you get too excited, this new version of PowerCLI is currently not available yet. As Alan mentioned in his session, we plan to release an early Tech Preview of PowerCLI for both Mac OS X and Linux as a VMware Fling shortly after VMworld. It is also very important to note that Microsoft PowerShell for Mac OS X & Linux which PowerCLI uses is just at an Alpha release milestone. There is still much work to do on both sides but I am really looking forward to enabling our customers with the choice of platform when it comes to consuming PowerCLI.

A few of us have been quite fortunate to have been involved in the early development of this new version of PowerCLI. In fact, we even built a simple Docker Container for PowerCLI which will allow you to easily access PowerCLI from any system that can run Docker. Here is a quick screenshot of spinning up a PowerCLI Docker Container which will also be part of the Fling release.

Lastly, we want customers to be able to quickly and securely set up a persistent PowerCLI environment in which they can use to manage and configure their VMware-based products that support PowerCLI. With that, we have also built a PowerShell package for Photon OS which is VMware's minimal Linux container host distribution. Not only is it free to download and use, but it literally takes a few seconds to install (tdnf -y install powershell) and even less time to boot up and import the PowerCLI module. This was literally done the week before VMworld by the Photon team and huge kudos for their support! As you can see, not only do we want to provide choice for our customers but also simplifying how you might consume PowerCLI whether its natively on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Docker Container or running on top of VMware Photon OS. I hope you are excited as I am and stay tuned for more details on the Fling release!

If you have any feedback or what you are most excited regarding this news, please leave a comment and I will make sure it makes it way back to our Product Manager.

Automating silent installation of VMware Tools on Linux w/Automatic Kernel Modules

06/17/2015 by William Lam 14 Comments

There was a recent question that was posted internally looking for a way to automate the silent installation of VMware Tools for Linux guest operating systems which also required enabling additional VMware Tools features like VMware's Automatic Kernel Modules. Currently, there are two options of installing VMware Tools for Linux guests, the first is by using VMware Tools Operating Specific Packages (OSPs) which can be found here or you can be manually install VMware Tools if an OSP does not exist or if you prefer to install interactively.

The second approach is what we will be focusing on and specifically with an emphasis on Automation 🙂 Once the VMware Tools installer is extracted, you will find a Perl script that does the actual magic called vmware-install.pl

The VMware Tools installer supports two modes of installation:

Interactive
Unattended with VMware defaults

The second option sounds like what we want but the problem is that the defaults have already been pre-selected by VMware and they can not be changed as far as I know. To use this option, you would specify the following:

./vmware-install.pl -d default

Here is a complete working snippet that I shared awhile back which will completely automate the installation of VMware Tools using the "default" method and is the quickest way to install VMware Tools for Linux guestOSes:

The solution above is great if you are okay with the defaults. However, if you wish to change any of the default settings such as the location of the installation or enabling additional VMware Tools capabilities, it is definitely not ideal. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier these are the only two supported installation mechanisms. Now, just imagine you need to roll out a custom installation of VMware Tools and having to perform the installation manually, there must be a way right?

Luckily, there is and this is actually a trick that I have used for many installers which require some user interaction. Below is an updated script of performing a silent installation of VMware Tools, but instead of using the defaults I have created an "answer" file which contains the input that you would manually enter and redirecting that into the installer. In this particular case, I have left the system defaults in terms of the paths and documentation of where VMware Tools will be installed and focus on enabling additional capabilities such as VMware automatic kernel modules.

The last four lines in the answer file (no, no, yes, no) maps to the following VMware Tools capabilities:

VMware Host-Guest Filesystem
vmblock enables dragging or copying files
VMware automatic kernel modules
Guest Authentication

You can change these based on your requirements but the current script only enables "VMware automatic kernel modules". I think a great feature enhancement to the VMware Tools installer is the ability to accept a silent configuration file, so that this use case can be better supported and more resilient in case additional options are added.