William Lam

VMworld Session VCSA INF5975 & INF4528 available to public

09.08.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I just found out this week after reading Eric Siebert blog post here, that a select number of VMworld 2015 US sessions have been made available to the general public on YouTube. I thought this was a very nice and pleasant surprise, especially for those who could not attend VMworld to be able to get a taste of some of the topics covered in last weeks conference. I personally have watched both the Cloud Native Apps and Future of NSX session, both of which I think are worth checking out not to mention the various demos in the NSX session!

For me personally, a hot topic that came up in almost every conversation when talking to our customers, field and partners at VMworld was the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). There were also plenty of sessions at the conference that covered the VCSA from basic introduction to performance to availability. Below are the two VCSA sessions that were selected to be made generally available to everyone, one of which I presented on. Hopefully you enjoy both videos and I would also like to thank everyone who attended my session last Monday. It was really great meeting many of my readers as well as customers looking to take advantage of the VCSA and some of the new features in our upcoming release. I also wrote a blog post here on the upcoming release of vSphere 6.0 Update 1 (GA sometime in Q3 2015) with respect to the VCSA in case you missed it.

INF5975 - vCenter Server Appliance as "First Choice" VC

INF4528 - vCenter Server Appliance Best Practices & Tips / Tricks

What's New in vSphere 6.0 Update 1 for VCSA?

09.01.2015 by William Lam // 31 Comments

One of the announcements at VMworld this week is the upcoming release of vSphere 6.0 Update 1 (GA sometime in Q3 2015) and in addition to bug fixes there are also several new enhancements that have been added. Here are some of the new capabilities specifically for the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).

New Deployment Targets - The VCSA now supports both vCenter Server (brownfield) as well as ESXi (greenfield) as a deployment targets.When using either the Guided UI or Scripted UI, you can now deploy to an existing vCenter Server which might serve as a management cluster for example. Previously, ESXi was the only supported deployment target.
Convert Embedded VCSA to External PSC - An Embedded VCSA deployment can now be re-configured or re-pointed to an External PSC using the new "reconfigure" and "repoint" option found in the /bin/cmsso-util utility. This allows customers to quickly get started using the simple Embedded VCSA deployment and as they get more comfortable and want to scale out to an External PSC for features like Enhanced Linked Mode, you can easily do so.

Two of the most frequently asked questions that I have seen from customers since the release of the VCSA 6.0 is where did the VMware Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) and URL-based patching go? These were definitely two missed features that did not make it into VCSA 6.0 release and today I am pleased to announce that they have returned with some nice enhancements!

VAMI UI - The VAMI UI can be accessed in the familiar 5480 port by visiting the following URL of the VCSA: https://[VCSA]:5480 and requires a local OS account to login like the root user account. The VAMI itself has been completely re-written both on the backend as well as the frontend which is now an HTML5 interface. All VAMI functionality can be accessed both from the UI as well as using the appliancesh command-line interface.

URL-based patching - URL-based patching is also included in the new VAMI UI interface. By default it is configured to point back to VMware's online repository but you can also configure it to use an ISO or a custom repository as previous versions supported. All patching capabilities are also available using the appliancesh command-line interface.

PSC UI - In addition to new VAMI UI, there also now a new Platform Services Controller (PSC) UI which is also written in HTML5. The new UI is located at the following URL: https://[VCSA]/psc and requires an SSO Administrator account to login. This new UI actually uses the same backend as the PSC configurations found within the vSphere Web Client. The idea behind this UI is to provide customers with a way to configure SSO and other related configurations within the PSC for either a greenfield setup or when the vSphere Web Client is unavailable. This can come in handy for troubleshooting purposes. Lastly, with the new PSC UI, you will now be able to replace certificates from a UI standpoint where as previously this was only available in the CLI.

Build-2-Build upgrade support - In prior releases, both a "Major" and "U" (Update) release of the VCSA meant that you had to deploy the new VCSA to perform a migration based upgrade. In vSphere 6.0 Update 1, "U" releases (U1, U2, etc) can now be accomplished by an in-place upgrade or sometimes refer to as a build-2-build. There will be a VCSA 6.0 Update 1 ISO which can be mounted within your existing VCSA 6.0 appliance to perform the upgrade as seen in the screenshot below.

appliancesh automation - The appliancesh interface in the VCSA 6.0 was primarily targeted for interactive usage and did not support any type of Automation. The feedback from customers was to provide a way to be able to call into the various appliancesh commands and in VCSA 6.0 Update 1, you can now execute a series of appliancesh commands within a file and re-directing that into an SSH session. VMware is also looking into providing a proper API for the appliancesh commands, if you have any feedback on this please leave a comment or reach out to Alan Renouf, who is the PM.

Below is the contents of the vcsa-commands.txt file which contains the following appliancesh commands to configure and enable NTP for the VCSA:

ntp.test --servers 0.pool.ntp.org,1.pool.ntp.org
ntp.server.add --server 0.pool.ntp.org,1.pool.ntp.org
timesync.set --mode NTP
ntp.get

Lastly, though this is not specific to the VCSA, I thought it was also worth mentioning that you can now access ALL capabilities of vSphere Update Manager (VUM) within the vSphere Web Client. VUM will still require a separate Windows system, but will fully inter-operate with both the Windows VC as well as the VCSA and you no longer need to rely on the vSphere C# Client to perform remediation or base-line creation and assignments.

As you can see, there are a ton of enhancements in the latest vSphere 6.0 Update 1 release and if you have not taken vSphere 6.0 for a spin yet, I definitely recommend starting with this release.

ESXi Embedded Host Client Fling updated to v2

08.26.2015 by William Lam // 13 Comments

The response and feedback from our customers on the recently released HTML5 Embedded Host Client for ESXi Fling has just been absolutely phenomenal. Having only been released for a little less than two weeks ago, it has also become the #1 Fling on the VMware Labs which is an amazing accomplishment in it itself as well as to the awesome work from both the Engineers: Etienne and George.

Having said that, both Etienne and George have not stopped and have been quite busy in the last couple of weeks. They have been working adding new features based on feedback from our customers as well as any bug fixes that have been reported. Today, I am please to announce that they have just released version2 of the Embedded Host Client for ESXi which you can find here. If you have v1 installed, you can perform an "update" by running the following ESXCLI command:

[root@mini:~] esxcli software vib update -v /esxui-3015331.vib
Installation Result
Message: Operation finished successfully.
Reboot Required: false
VIBs Installed: VMware_bootbank_esx-ui_0.0.2-0.1.3015331
VIBs Removed: VMware_bootbank_esx-ui_0.0.2-0.1.2976804
VIBs Skipped:

In addition to the new features listed below in v2, I would also like to mention we now have both an installable VIB as well as an offline bundle as some of you have been asking for which will allow you to use vSphere Update Manager (VUM) to automate the deployment of the Embedded Host Client across your ESXi hosts.

What's new in v2:

Host
- Improved host performance monitoring UI
- Composite CPU/memory figure
Virtual Machines
- VM Snapshot support.
- In-browser VM console full screen support.
- In-browser VM console 'shrink’ support.
- Create Wizard: Mac OS guest creation has been enabled.
Storage
- Completed file browser (copy/move/delete/create directory/upload/download)
- Right click on VMX file in browser to register VM
- Mount/create NFS datastores
- Create VMFS datastore (currently only on disks that don't have a partition table)
- Extend VMFS datastore (currently only onto disks that don't have a partition table)
- Mount/Unmount VMFS datastore
Networking
- Firewall ruleset listing (currently read-only)
General Features
- Double click title bar to enlarge dialogs and wizards
- Alt + drag in a dialog or wizard to resize
- Locale override (we still only support en-US at this stage)
- Customizable session timeout.

I have already deployed the latest version in my lab and I have to say, the new features rock. One tiny little feature which I really like is a session timeout count down which appears on your browser tab of the Embedded Host Client when left idle.

In my opinion, the attention to details both big and small is what really differentiates this UI from any other that I have used and really provides for a fantastic user experience. Keep up the great work guys!

If you have any feedback, please leave a comment either on my blog or on the Fling site and who knows, your request might just make it into the next release 🙂