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You are here: Home / Uncategorized / Automating vCenter Server Appliance 5.0 (VCSA) Configurations

Automating vCenter Server Appliance 5.0 (VCSA) Configurations

02.07.2012 by William Lam // 2 Comments

I recently had a need to deploy half a dozen or so vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) in my home lab and even though it is one of the easiest appliances to setup, going through the web management interface can still be time consuming. I was looking to see if there was a way to automate some of the configurations and while digging in some of the vCenter logs I came across /var/log/vmware/vpx/vpxd_cfg.log which provided the answer I was looking for.

If you watch the log as you configure the VCSA through the web management interface, you will see a series of commands calling /usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg. This utility is actually just a shell script wrapper for the configuration of vpxd (vCenter Server Daemon) and it's respective services.

As you can see there is a warning message about the use of the tool, so I will also re-iterate with my own disclaimer:

Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes only, this is not officially supported by VMware. Please test this in a development environment before using it on actual systems.

For my lab, this was exactly what I was looking for to quickly spin up VCSA and configure all the necessary services to start the vCenter Service. In my lab, I was able to get the VCSA booted up via DHCP and execute a simple shell script remotely via SSH to VCSA and then connect to vCenter Server after the process was completed.

Here is script with the minimal commands needed for running an embedded configuration:

#!/bin/bash

echo "Accepting EULA ..."
/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg eula accept

echo "Configuring Embedded DB ..."
/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg db write embedded

echo "Configuring SSO..."
/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg sso write embedded

echo "Starting VCSA ..."
/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg service start

To run the script remotely (you do not need to copy it to VCSA), use the following command:

# ssh [email protected][vcsa-ip] < configureVCSA.sh

The script accepts the EULA, configures the database as embedded configuration and then starts up the vCenter service. A return code is provided upon each command execution which has VC_CFG_RESULT=N where N can be 0 which is a successful execution and any other value means there is an error. To figure out what the code means, there is a section in the shell script that lists all the codes and their meaning. In general, you should be getting 0 for all commands

Here are some other useful commands that I tested with:

Configure Active Directory:

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg ad write [AD_USERNAME] [AD_PASSWORD] [AD_DOMAIN]

Re-initialize vCenter DB *** PLEASE BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN USING THIS COMMAND, AS DB IS WIPED***

ensure vpxd has stopped

vpxd_servicecfg stop

re-init DB

vpxd_servicecfg db initialize

You can also configure an external database for vCenter, NIS directory service and even replace SSL certificates but I will leave that to the reader for some exploration.

More from my site

  • Automating VCSA 5.1 (vCenter Server Appliance) Configurations
  • Increasing disk capacity simplified with VCSA 6.0 using LVM autogrow
  • Completely automating vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 5.5 Configurations
  • Quick Tip - Automate JVM Heap configurations after increasing VCSA memory
  • Automating VCSA 5.5 Configurations including SSO Administrator password

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // vcenter, vcsa, vcva, vpxd_servicecfg

Comments

  1. VMGuru1 says

    07/19/2012 at 9:28 pm

    William,

    How do I script a deployment of the VCSA 5 OVF and setup the Static IP, Gateway, DNS, password, etc all from a Windows batch file?

    I need to repetitively setup a series of VCSAs for classes.

    Currently, I manaully deploy from OVF, SSH in, change the password and then go through the text interface to do the Network settings. Thank you.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Automating VCSA 5.1 (vCenter Server Appliance) Configurations | virtuallyGhetto says:
    03/10/2014 at 3:31 am

    […] you have seen my previous article on Automating VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) 5.0, you will notice the existing script will not work on latest VCSA 5.1, without a minor tweak. The […]

    Reply

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Author

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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