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You are here: Home / Automation / Unattended Deployment of vCenter Orchestrator Virtual Appliance

Unattended Deployment of vCenter Orchestrator Virtual Appliance

11.14.2011 by William Lam // 9 Comments

This weekend I spent sometime with the new vCenter Orchestrator virtual appliance in the ghetto lab. Instead of using the vSphere Client to deploy the OVF, I wanted to see if I could deploy it 100% from the command line using the ovftool. One of the cool things about OVF from an author perspective, is the ability to create custom variables which can then be specified during deployment to include guest customization, network or application configurations.

In the case of the new vCO virtual appliance, VMware provides the following four variables to customize the network configuration:

  • vami.DNS.vCO_Appliance
  • vami.gateway.vCO_Appliance
  • vami.ip0.vCO_Appliance
  • vami.netmask0.vCO_Appliance

Using the ovftool, you can specify the following variables to not only deploy the vCO OVF through the commandline but also configure the guestOS network without having to manually go through vSphere Client or remote console.

Here is an example of the ovftool command to deploy vCO:

/usr/bin/ovftool --acceptAllEulas --skipManifestCheck '--net:Network 1=VM_Network' --datastore=vesxi50-1-local-storage-1 --diskMode=thin --name=vco --prop:vami.DNS.vCO_Appliance=172.30.0.100 --prop:vami.gateway.vCO_Appliance=172.30.0.1 --prop:vami.ip0.vCO_Appliance=172.30.0.142 --prop:vami.netmask0.vCO_Appliance=255.255.255.0 vCO_VA-4.2.0.1-507352_OVF10.ovf 'vi://root:*protected email*/?dns=vesxi50-1.primp-industries.com'
Opening OVF source: vCO_VA-4.2.0.1-507352_OVF10.ovf

If the command looks a little daunting, it is really not and to make the deployment of vCO even simpler, I decided to write a small shell script called deployvCO.sh that users can use.

The script assumes you have ovftool installed and downloaded both the vCO OVF and system disk in the same working directory. You will need to edit a few variables within the script which specifies the vCenter and ESXi host to deploy to and resources for vCO appliance such as network portgroup, datastore, etc.

Note: There are many ways of using the ovftool to deploy an OVF. In this simple example, it requires you to specify an ESX(i) host, but you can modify the locator to deploy to a VM folder or datacenter path. For more examples and options, please take a look at the ovftool documentation.

Here is an example of the script in action:

Once the vCO virtual appliance has been deployed, you can also have it automatically power on by specifying the following parameter --powerOn.

If everything was successful, you should now be able to point your browser to the hostname of your vCO server and you should taken to the vCO splash screen.

Now you can easily deploy vCO without the need of the vSphere Client! Happy workflowing 🙂

More from my site

  • Org vDC to vCenter Resource Pool Workflow Using vCenter Orchestrator
  • Congratulations to Chris Greer for Winning Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator
  • Win a Free Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator Book
  • Performing A Storage vMotion in vCloud Director Using vCO
  • Leveraging vCD + vCO + Wavemaker Part 2

Categories // Automation, OVFTool Tags // orchestrator, ovftool, vCO

Comments

  1. Robb says

    06/11/2013 at 4:52 pm

    Great work! really helped with what I'm doing, one question I have is how to auto accept the SSL thumbprint? when I try to deploy VDP

    Accept SSL fingerprint (77:47:CA:D5:21:07:CD:82:04:08:0A:9C:11:2D:17:F5:D9:90:E4:C4) for host 1.1.1.1 as target type.
    Fingerprint will be added to the known host file
    Write 'yes' or 'no'

    would you use?

    --targetSSLThumbprint

    SSLthumbprint of the target.OVF Tool verifies
    the SSL thumbprint that it receives from the
    target,if this value is set

    Reply
  2. Robb says

    06/11/2013 at 6:31 pm

    Found it -noSSLVerify Thanks!

    Reply
    • Ryan Austin says

      05/15/2015 at 10:46 pm

      Thanks, Robb --- was looking for that myself, as the installer was inexplicably hanging near the end. Tons of SSL fingerprint verification "yes or no?" questions filled the esxi_firstboot.log file. That -noSSLVerify flag fixed it!

      Reply
  3. KingSongYoung says

    11/04/2014 at 8:32 am

    --noSSLVerify works well, thanks!

    Reply
  4. Tarun says

    06/11/2015 at 10:13 pm

    Thanks. This page really helped me a lot.

    For unattended deployment to work for vCO 5.5 just add two more properties for ovftool command.
    --prop:varoot-password=<>
    --prop:vcoconf-password=<>

    Reply
  5. Jesper says

    02/14/2016 at 1:08 pm

    Hi

    The path for the script deployvCO.sh links to sourceforge.net, and the readme file direct you to GitHub.

    Regards
    Jesper

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Quickly Configuring the New vCenter Orchestrator 5.1 Appliance | virtuallyGhetto says:
    03/01/2014 at 4:44 pm

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    03/02/2014 at 6:29 pm

    […] 1.5 Server and Node which is distributed as a virtual appliance. Just like in previous post Unattended Deployment of vCenter Orchestrator Virtual Appliance here is how you can automate the deployment of vCloud Connector Server and vCloud Connector […]

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    06/07/2015 at 4:43 pm

    […] ← Unattended Deployment of vCenter Orchestrator Virtual Appliance New Parameter in vim-cmd snapshot.remove for ESX(i) 4.1 Update 2 → […]

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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