WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud
  • Tanzu
    • Application Modernization
    • Tanzu services
    • Tanzu Community Edition
    • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
    • vSphere with Tanzu
  • Home Lab
  • Nested Virtualization
  • Apple
You are here: Home / ESXi / Hidden OVF 2.0 capablity found in the vSphere Content Library

Hidden OVF 2.0 capablity found in the vSphere Content Library

01.12.2016 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

There are a number of new and useful capabilities that have been introduced in the OVF 2.0 specification. One such capability which I thought was really interesting and that could easily benefit VMware-based solutions is the ScaleOutSection feature. This feature allows you specify the number of instances of a given Virtual Appliance to instantiate at deployment time by making use of pre-defined OVF Deployment Options which can also be overriden by a user.

Lets use an example to see how this actually works. Say you have a single Virtual Appliance (VA) and the application within the appliance can scale to N, where N is any number greater or equal to 1. If you wanted to deploy 3 instances of this VA, you would have to deploy it 3 separate times by either by running through an OVF upload or deploying it from a template. In either case, you are performing N-instantiations. Would it not be cool if you could still start with a single VA image and specify at deployment time the number of instances you want to deploy and only need to upload the VA just once? Well, that is exactly what the OVF ScaleOutSection feature provides.

Below is a diagram to help illustrate this feature further. We start out with our single VA, which contains several pre-defined Deployment Options which can contain any text you wish for the logical grouping. In this example, I am using the terms "Single", "Minimal" and "Typical" to map to number of VA's to deploy which are 1, 3, and 4 respectively. If we choose the "Minimal" Deployment option, we would then get 3 instantiated VA's. If we decide that the defaults are not sufficient, we could also override the default by specifying a different number which the VA supports.

OVF20_ScaleOut
A really cool use case that I had thought about when I first came across the ScaleOutSection feature was to make use of it with my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance. This capability would make it even easier to standup a vSphere or VSAN Cluster of any size for development or testing purposes. Today, vSphere and many of the other VMware products only support OVF 1.x specification and as far as I know, OVF 2.0 was not something that was being looked at.

Right before holiday break, I was chatting with one of the Engineers in the Content Library team and one of the topics that I had discussed in passing was OVF 2.0 support. It turns out that, although vSphere itself does not support OVF 2.0, the vSphere Content Library feature actually contains a very basic implementation of OVF 2.0 and though not complete, it does have some support for the ScaleOutSection feature.

This of course got me thinking and with the help of the Engineer, I was able to build a prototype version of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance supporting the ScaleOutSection feature. Below is a quick video that demonstrates how this feature would work using a current release of vSphere 6.0. Pretty cool if you ask me!? 🙂

Demo of Prototype Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance using OVF 2.0 ScaleOut from lamw on Vimeo.

Now, before you get too excited. There were a couple of caveats that I found while going through the deployment workflow. During the deployment, the VMDKs were not properly being processed and when you power on the VMs, it was as if they were empty disks. This was a known issue and I have been told this has already been resolved in a future update. The other bigger issue is how OVF properties are handled with multiple instances of the VA. Since this is not a supported workflow, the OVF wizard is only brought up once regardless of the number of instances being deployed. This means that all VAs will inherit the same OVF values since are you are only prompted once. The workaround was to deploy the VAs, then go into each individual VA and update their OVF properties before powering on the VMs. Since OVF 2.0 and the ScaleOutSection feature is not an officially supported feature, the user experience is not as ideal as one would expect.

I personally think there are some pretty interesting use cases that could be enabled by OVF 2.0 and ScaleOutSection feature. A few VMware specific solutions that I can think of off the top of my head that could potentially leverage this capability are vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Operations Manager and vRealize Automation Center to just name a few. I am sure there are others including 3rd party and custom Virtual Appliances that have been developed and I am curious to hear if this is something that might be of interest to you? If you have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment and I can share this with the Content Library PM.

More from my site

  • Packer reference for building PhotonOS Virtual Appliance using OVF properties 
  • Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 3
  • Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 2
  • Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 1
  • Quick Tip - vSphere with Tanzu fails to sync Content Library with 500 Internal Server Error

Categories // ESXi, Nested Virtualization, OVFTool, vSphere Tags // content library, ova, ovf, ovf 2.0, ScaleOutSection, virtual appliance

Thanks for the comment! Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search

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)

Connect

  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Recent

  • Automated ESXi Installation with a USB Network Adapter using Kickstart 02/01/2023
  • How to bootstrap ESXi compute only node and connect to vSAN HCI Mesh? 01/31/2023
  • Quick Tip - Easily move or copy VMs between two Free ESXi hosts? 01/30/2023
  • vSphere with Tanzu using Intel Arc GPU 01/26/2023
  • Quick Tip - Automating allowed and not allowed Datastores for use with vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) 01/25/2023

Advertisment

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2023

 

Loading Comments...