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Building minimal vSphere demo lab using VMware Fusion/Workstation with only 8GB memory?

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After tweeting this update last week, I received quite a few questions on how I was able to squeeze a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) & ESXi 6.0 Update 1 along with a VMware Photon VM, all running on my Mac Book Air with only 8GB of memory. Although, I was not able to make use of my demo which was for my vSphere Content Library session at VMworld Europe this week; I thought I would still share the details on how I built this vSphere lab environment which could come in handy for others.

I wanted to run everything on my Mac Book Air primarily for the convenience factor so I did not have to bring my Mac Mini which may not be ideal for traveling aboard. The performance and responsiveness of the environment was actually pretty good and I was able to also access the vSphere Web Client using Google Chrome as well as OS X terminal for CLI operations without any problems. It definitely helps if you place all VMs on SSDs, which is especially useful if swapping occurs since we are overcommitting the physical memory.

minimal-vsphere-demo-lab-on-fusion-or-workstation-with-only-8GB-of-memory-3
Below are the instructions for building this environment and here is a quick summary of the expected memory configuration for the three VMs.

Virtual Machine Memory
Embedded vCenter Server Appliance VM 5GB
ESXi VM 3GB
Photon VM 384 MB

Step 1 - Download the VCSA & ESXi 6.0 Update 1 ISO (or any other version you wish to run). You will need to extract the contents of VCSA ISO and the OVA is located in /vcsa/vmware-vcsa and you will need to add the .ova extension.

Step 2 - We will need to configure memory overcommitment for VMware Fusion/Workstation to allow for the majority of the memory to be swapped to be able to run our minimal vSphere environment. You will need to set the value of prefvmx.minVmMemPct to 25 by adding the following line to the respective configuration file shown in the table below.

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = 25

Hypervisor Configuration File
VMware Workstation C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini
VMware Fusion /Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/config

Step 3 - Deploy the VCSA OVA to either your VMware Fusion or Workstation deployment and ensure you do not power on the VM. We will need to make the following edits to the VCSA's VMX file to ensure it is properly configured when it is powered on. Below is an example of the VMX parameters you will need to add before powering on the VM.

guestinfo.cis.deployment.node.type = "embedded"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.domain-name = "vghetto.local"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.site-name = "vghetto"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.password = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr.family = "ipv4"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr = "192.168.1.54"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.pnid = "192.168.1.54"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.prefix = "24"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.mode = "static"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.dns.servers = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.gateway = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.passwd = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.ssh.enabled = "true"

Step 5 - Once the VCSA has successfully been configured and you can connect to it using the vSphere Web Client, you can then power it off and reduce the memory from 8GB to 5GB.

Step 4 - Create a new VM using the ESXi 6.x GuestOS type for running your Nested ESXi VM and stick with the defaults of 4GB of memory to be able to install ESXi. Once the VM has been created, go ahead and install ESXi using the ISO as you normally would.

Step 5 - Once the ESXi VM has successfully been installed and booted up, you can then power it off and reduce the memory from 4GB to 3GB.

Step 6  (Optional) - If you wish to play with VMware Photon, you can also install Photon using the ISO which can be downloaded from here or deploy using the OVA which can be downloaded from here.

For folks who have more memory in their system, you could add an additional two Nested ESXi VMs to then run a full VSAN setup and then you will have a pretty powerful, with minimal resource footprint that you can bring with you anywhere to run demos or for development and testing purposes. I also highly recommend making use of the "Suspend" operation when you need to quickly get access to memory or run other applications and this also allows you to quickly resume the entire environment in just a few seconds without having to power down the entire setup which will take much longer.

UEFI PXE boot is possible in ESXi 6.0

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A couple of days ago I received an interesting question from fellow colleague Paudie O'Riordan, who works over in our Storage and Availability Business Unit at VMware. He was helping a customer who was interested in PXE booting/installing ESXi using UEFI which is short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. Historically, we only had support for PXE booting/installing ESXi using the BIOS firmware. You also could boot an ESXi ISO using UEFI, but we did not have support for UEFI when it came to booting/installing ESXi over the network using PXE and other variants such as iPXE/gPXE.

For those of you who may not know, UEFI is meant to eventually replace the legacy BIOS firmware. There are many benefits with using UEFI over BIOS, a recent article that does a good job of explaining the differences can be found here. In doing some research and pinging a few of our ESXi experts internally, I found that UEFI PXE boot support is actually possible with ESXi 6.0. Not only is it possible to PXE boot/install ESXi 6.x using UEFI, but the changes in the EFI boot image are also backwards compatible, which means you could potentially PXE boot/install an older release of ESXi.

Note: Auto Deploy still requires legacy BIOS firmware, UEFI is not currently supported today. This is something we will be addressing in the future, so stay tuned.

Not having worked with ESXi and UEFI before, I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to give this a try in my homelab which would also allow me to document the process in case others were interested. For my PXE server, I am using CentOS 6.7 Minimal (64-Bit) which runs both the DHCP and TFTP services but you can use any distro that you are comfortable with.

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How to configure shared folders in VMware AppCatalyst?

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A widely used feature in VMware's hosted products (Fusion & Workstation) is the shared folders capabilities which allows you to easily share files between the host system and your Virtual Machines. With the latest release of VMware's AppCatalyst TP2, shared folders is now officially supported and can be configured using the AppCatalyst's REST API. Below are the instructions on setting up shared folders for your VMs running in AppCatalyst. Thanks to Fabio for sharing the details.

I will assume that you already have a VM that is running under AppCatalyst. If you do not, you can run the following commands to quickly deploy a new VM called "photon" from the default VMware Photon OS template and retrieve the IP Address assigned to the VM (which we will make use later).

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vm create photon
/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vmpower on photon
/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst guest getip photon

If you have not used AppCatalyst before, be sure to check out this getting started guide here.

Step 1 - Open a terminal and start the AppCatalyst Daemon by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst-daemon

Step 2 - Open a browser to connect to the following URL https://localhost:8080 to access the REST API explorer provided by Swagger.

Step 3 - Expand the POST /vms/{id}/folders which is the API to configure shared folders for a particular VM. You will need to fill in the id property which specifies the name of the VM and the state property defines the shared folder configuration.

Here is an example for creating a shared folder in the guest called "shared-folder" and mapping that to the host folder under /Users/lamw/Development. The flags property specifies how the folder will be accessed by the VM. Currently, there is only one flag implemented which is "4" and means read/write access. In the future there maybe more flags implemented for different types of access.

{
"guestPath":"shared-folder",
"hostPath":"/Users/lamw/Development",
"flags":4
}

Once you have entered the information into the UI, to execute the API request you just need to click on the "Try it out" button at the bottom. If the operation was successful, you should get back a 200 response from the UI.

Screen Shot 2015-10-02 at 9.33.31 AM
Note: The guestPath property is not actually a path in the VM but rather the name of the directory which will map to the host shared folder.

Step 4 - We can now login to our VM to confirm that the shared folder has been configured. If you are using the default Photon template, you can login by specifying the default SSH keys included with AppCatalyst and the IP Address of the Photon VM we deployed earlier.

Here is the command to login (be sure to replace with the IP Address from your enviornment):

ssh -i /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/etc/appcatalyst_insecure_ssh_key [email protected]

Step 5 - Once logged in, if we now look under /mnt/hgfs directory, we should now see the shared directory automatically created and mapped to the host shared folder we created earlier.

Screen Shot 2015-10-02 at 9.35.13 AM
If you wish to remove shared folders from a VM, you can do so by executing the DELETE /vms/{id}/folders/{folderId} API and specifying the id for both the VM and folder. Hopefully in the future, shared folders can also be easily consumed through the simple AppCatalyst CLI, but for now you can do so using the REST API.