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You are here: Home / Automation / Unattended Deployment of vCloud Director Virtual Appliance

Unattended Deployment of vCloud Director Virtual Appliance

11.18.2011 by William Lam // 1 Comment

VMware just released vCloud Director 1.5 as a virtual appliance for the first time. This virtual appliance is not meant to be used in a production environment, but to help users easily deploy and evaluate vCloud Director. There is also an updated vCloud Director Evaluators Guide that goes along with the new vCD appliance that was released today which you should also check out.

Just like in previous post on unattended deployments of vCenter Orchestrator and vCloud Connector. Here is how you can automate the deployment of vCloud Director.

Here are the four ovf properties that are used to configure the network for vCloud Director 1.5

  • vami.gateway.VMware_vCloud_Director
  • vami.DNS.VMware_vCloud_Director
  • vami.ip0.VMware_vCloud_Director
  • vami.netmask0.VMware_vCloud_Director
  • vami.ip1.VMware_vCloud_Director
  • vami.netmask1.VMware_vCloud_Director

Note: There are two network interfaces for vCloud Director, one for HTTP and one for CONSOLE access.

To see these properties before deploying, you can query using the ovftool which can help you identify the name of the ovf variables using the following command:

ovftool --hideEula vCloud_Director_VA_CentoOS5-1.5.0.0-525550_OVF10.ova

Here is an example of the ovftool command to deploy vCD Server:

ovftool --acceptAllEulas --skipManifestCheck '--net:Network 1=VM_Network' '--net:Network 2=VM_Network' --datastore=vesxi50-2-local-storage-1 --diskMode=thin --name=vcd --prop:vami.DNS.VMware_vCloud_Director=172.30.0.100 --prop:vami.gateway.VMware_vCloud_Director=172.30.0.1 --prop:vami.ip0.VMware_vCloud_Director=172.30.0.148 --prop:vami.netmask0.VMware_vCloud_Director=255.255.255.0 --prop:vami.ip1.VMware_vCloud_Director=172.30.0.149 --prop:vami.netmask1.VMware_vCloud_Director=255.255.255.0 vCloud_Director_VA_CentoOS5-1.5.0.0-525550_OVF10.ova 'vi://root:*protected email*/?dns=vesxi50-2.primp-industries.com'

Of course, I wrote a simple shell script deployvCD.sh to help with the deployment. The script assumes you have ovftool installed and the OVF files located in the same directory as the script. You will need to edit the following variables if you wish to deploy vCD Server:

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 vCD 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 vCD Server and you should taken to the vCD splash screen.

Happy vClouding 🙂

More from my site

  • Quick Tip - Using ovftool to connect to vCloud Director behind a 2-Factor Authentication portal
  • How to deploy vSphere 6.0 (VCSA & ESXi) on vCloud Director and vCloud Air?
  • Creating your own 3rd Party Content Library for vSphere 6.0 & vCloud Director 5.x
  • CoreOS is now available as OVA in Alpha channel
  • Configuring a "Whitelist" for VM advanced settings in vCloud Director

Categories // Automation, OVFTool Tags // ovftool, vcd, vcloud director

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  1. How to Deploy an OVF Located On ESXi Datastore Using ovftool | virtuallyGhetto says:
    03/02/2014 at 6:14 pm

    […] have written several articles in the past about the awesome ovftool which is a versatile remote command-line utility for […]

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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