vapp

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 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.

Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 2

02/19/2019 by William Lam 6 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 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.

Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 1

02/01/2019 by William Lam 5 Comments

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.

OVF template for creating Nested ESXi 3 or 32 node VSAN Cluster

04/15/2014 by William Lam 14 Comments

Last week I had to build a couple of Nested VSAN environments for testing and of course I used my VSAN Nested ESXi OVF template to help expedite the deployment. After deploying the OVF for the third time to get my three Nested ESXi nodes, it hit me. Why am I doing this each time when I know I will need a minimum of three nodes for a proper VSAN environment? Not sure why I did not think of this earlier, but why not create a vApp that contains three Nested ESXi VM templates?

By leveraging the Dynamic Disk feature in OVF, I was able to create two tiny vApps (40KB & 410KB respectively) based off of my original Nested VSAN ESXi OVF template:

The only difference with these OVF templates is that you can now easily an quickly deploy a single OVF that will contain the minimal number of VSAN nodes up to the maximum supported which is 32.

Disclaimer: Nested Virtualization is not not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk

Prerequisite:

vSphere Web Client
- To deploy either the single VSAN Nested ESXi OVF template or these new ones, you need to make sure you deploy using the vSphere Web Client. The reason for this is that the lossless OVF import/export feature is only available when using the vSphere Web Client, else you the import will not capture all the settings the OVF template was configured with.
vSphere Cluster w/DRS enabled
- vApp creation is only possible when DRS is enabled

Step 1 - Deploy the OVF template using the vSphere Web Client and make sure you select "Accept extra configuration options" which contains extra parameters needed to run ESXi and VSAN in a nested environment.

Step 2 - Go through the OVF deployment wizard as you normally would. When you get to "Customize Template" you will notice each Nested ESXi VM is in its own Category as seen in the screenshot below. Here you can leave the defaults for a minimal VSAN deployment which contains 2GB disk for ESXi installation, 4GB disk for an "emulated" SSD and 8GB disk for MD or you can specify the size for each disk.

In just a couple of seconds, you will now have a vApp that contains either a 3-node Nested ESXi VM or you can go big and deploy a 32-node Nested ESXi environment.

Note: Please note there maybe other configurations changes such as this one and/or increase in VM resources to run larger VSAN Clusters.

I know these OVF templates will come in handy for myself when needing to quickly deploy a VSAN running in a Nested ESXi environment and hopefully it will also benefit others in the community as well!