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Content Library Tech Preview at VMworld Europe 2015

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For those of you who were fortunate enough to attend the Content Library Technical Deep Dive session (#5106) at VMworld Europe several weeks back and stayed until the very end, you were treated to an exclusive sneak peak demo. The demo was well received from what I heard, especially having been one of the most popular feature requests when talking to customers. I know the Content Library Engineering team has been working hard on this feature and I thought what better way than to show it off at VMworld!

I recently had a meeting with the Content Library Dev Manager (Pratima Rao) who also had presented at VMworld Europe and I just got the green light to share the demo with my readers. As a reminder, this is a Tech Preview and I encourage you to check out the disclaimer below if you have any questions related to the delivery of this feature 🙂 So without further ado, here is the Tech Preview video that was demo'ed at VMworld.

Note: There is no audio to the video, but for those interested in what is happening in the video, here is a quick summary. Today, you can upload and manage ISO images within the Content Library, however when trying to mount an ISO from the Content Library, the workflow is not as straight forward as it could be. In a future update of vSphere, you will now have a new option to directly mount an ISO from the Content Library. The demo starts off by showing some ISOs that have already been uploaded to an existing Content Library. We can then access those ISOs by going to the Virtual Machine settings and using the familiar mount ISO workflow to access the content. You will see that there is now a new option to mount an ISO from the Content Library and you will be presented with a filtered list of all files with .iso extension. Once you have selected the the ISO, the VM will mount it like you normally would from a vSphere Datastore or from the client system. Some additional things to note is that you can also filter by searching for specific content by using the search box in case you have multiple Content Libraries. Lastly, there are some useful metadata in the columns fields when looking through your ISOs which could help with further identifying the content you are interested in.

Disclaimer: This is an early Tech Preview and the overview of new technology represents no commitment from VMware to deliver these features in any generally available product. Features are subject to change, and must not be included in contracts, purchase orders, or sales agreement of any kind. Technically feasibility and market demand will affect final delivery. Pricing and packaging for any new technologies features discussed or represented have not been determined

Content Library Tech Preview at VMworld Europe 2015 from lamw on Vimeo.

EMC Project OnRack now RackHD

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Back in May, EMC announced a new initiative at EMC World called Project OnRack which had an ambitious goal of providing a new software abstraction layer that would sit on top of existing "industry standards" for server out-of-band management. Standards such as IPMI, CIM, SMI-S and CIM-SMASH to just name a few were supposed to help IT administrators manage and operate the life-cycle of their physical servers. Instead, we ended up with even more complexity and inconsistency due to the different implementations of these "industry standards" across vendors and sometimes even within the same vendor. Trying to keep firmware, BIOS, hardware drivers, etc. up to date across different hardware platforms from the same vendor in a consistent and automated fashion was already painful enough. As If this was not already challenging enough, try doing this for a mix of hardware platforms across different vendors and you have just given your operational and datacenter team a never ending nightmare.

Frankly, I am pretty surprised that it has taken us this long to finally tackle this problem. This is something we have needed for quite some time now and I still remember the early days as an admin trying to script around the inconsistencies of IPMI to configure things like asset tags and serial numbers across different hardware platforms.

In my opinion, having a consistent and programmable interface to this low level of hardware is a critical component to a Software-Defined Datacenter and has often been overlooked. Kudos to EMC for taking on this initiative and more importantly driving this change through open-source and the community in mind.

Since the announcement back in May, things have been been pretty quiet about OnRack, until recently that is. I was listening to a recent episode of The Hot Aisle Podcast with guest Brad Maltz of EMC talking about Hyper-Converged Infrastructure. Among the different topics discussed, OnRack was brought up along with dis-aggregated hardware/infrastructure where individual compute resources can scale up independently of each other. There were a couple of nice tidbits mentioned on the podcast. First, it looks like OnRack which was the internal EMC project name has now been renamed to RackHD as the external project name. Second, it looks like the RackHD repo is already on Github with some initial content including some pretty detailed documentation on the architecture and components which can be found here.

The OnRack project looks to be made up of the following sub-projects per the documentation:

  • on-tftp - NodeJS application provided TFTP service integrated with the workflow engine
  • on-http - internal HTTP REST API interfaces integrated with the workflow engine
  • on-syslog - syslog endpoint integrated to feed data into workflow engine
  • on-taskgraph - NodeJS application providing the workflow engine
  • on-dhcp-proxy - NodeJS application providing DHCP proxy support integrated into the workflow engine
  • onserve - OnServe Engine
  • core library - Core libraries in use across NodeJS applications
  • task library - NodeJS task library for the workflow engine
  • tools - Useful dev tools for running locally
  • webui - Initial web interfaces to some of the APIs - multiple interfaces embedded into a single project
  • integration tests - Integration tests with code for deploying and running those tests, as well as the tests themselves
  • statsd - A local statsD implementation that makes it easy to deploy on a local machine for capturing application metrics

Brand mentioned that many of the Github repos are still marked private as they are still working through the process of releasing RackHD to the public. It looks like RackHD and all relevant repos are now all open source as of Monday Nov 2nd, for more details please visit the Github repo here. I am definitely excited to see how this project will evolve with the larger community and some of the new innovations which will be unlocked due to this barrier being removed. Hopefully we will see positive collaboration from other hardware vendors which will help us move forward and finally solve this problem once and for all! I can already see huge benefits for software only vendors like VMware who can integrate RackHD directly into provisioning tools like Auto Deploy or configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef and Ansible for example. It will also be interesting to see how other startups in this area like NodePrime and another stealth company, who is also working on solving a similar problem and whether they would leverage RackHD or not.

How to prompt for user input during an interactive or scripted install of ESXi?

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A question that continues to pop up from time to time is whether it is possible to prompt for user input during an interactive or scripted installation of ESXi? This is actually something I have written about before using PXE boot options as a workaround to provide for a semi-interactive automated installation of ESXi. The most recent request for this was not actually from a customer but rather someone internally working at VMware. The individual noted that he had already read my blog and a few other references but was still hopeful for a solution. I remember when I had looked into this problem several years back, I was not able to find anything and the inquiries to VMware (which I was still a customer at the time) came up empty.

UPDATE (01/10/19) - For ESXi 6.5 or greater, please take a look at this blog post for an updated solution

After replying back to the individual with the information that I had, it actually got me thinking which is usually not good 😉 Having just recently finished building a new Kickstart environment to test UEFI PXE boot for ESXi 6.0, I figure I might as well take another look at this topic again. I wanted to see if there was something that could be done with one of the /dev/ttyl (teletype) interfaces while the ESXi Installation was running. I did a couple of Google searches and to my surprise, there was someone on the VMTN Community forum who had already solved this problem and posted a solution almost 1 year before my article, not sure how I could have missed that?!

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