William Lam

How to quickly deploy new CoreOS Image w/VMware Tools on ESXi?

11.06.2014 by William Lam // 14 Comments

Thanks to a conversation I had this morning with a Twitter user @BOK, I learned that CoreOS has just recently published a new CoreOS Alpha Image (v490.0.0) that now includes the Open VMware Tools package. In addition, the new image also now uses the optimized VMXNET3 network adapter. From our chat, it looks like this update is not available in the insecure or VMware Fusion image and I can only guess that these images may eventually get deprecated or removed completely in favor for the newer VMware image which can both run on ESXi as well as hosted products like VMware Fusion/Workstation.

@BOK also shared with me a modified version of my script that I initially created to automate the deployment of CoreOS onto ESXi. The original workflow had to be slightly modified as the new image is only available as bz2 (bunzip2) and ESXi does not contain the bunzip2 utility. This means there are now two steps: first is to extract the VMDK and upload to ESXi datastore which is going to be done manually and you can run the script which will automatically convert the VMDK to the proper format and register the VM in ESXi.

I was thinking about how I could simplify this process, even though it is just a couple of extra commands, I always like to see how I can make something easier to consume and reducing the complexity if possible. I of course decided to create a new script called deploy_coreos_on_esxi2.sh which now runs outside of the ESXi Shell. The script requires a UNIX/Linux system that has the bunzip2 utility and will automatically download both the VMX and VMDK file, perform the extraction and then upload it to ESXi host using an HTTP API provided through the vSphere Datastore. Lastly, it auto-generates the configuration shell script that will run over SSH to the ESXi host (SSH is still required) which will perform the same set of operations as my previous script did.

Note: You will be prompted to enter the ESXi root password when it tries to run the script remotely on the ESXi Shell, there is a timeout for 120seconds in case you step away from the console.

Prior to running the script, you will need to edit the following 7 variables:

ESXi_HOST
ESXI_USERNAME
ESXI_PASSWORD
ESXI_DATASTORE
VM_NETWORK
VM_NAME

Here is a screenshot of running the script from my Mac OS X desktop:

Once the CoreOS VM has fully booted, we can take a look at our vSphere Client and we should see that VMware Tools is in fact running and we can see the IP Address automatically being displayed in the UI:

The really nice thing about having VMware Tools running in the CoreOS image, is that you can use VMware's Guest Operations API to be able to perform operations within the guest which are proxied through VMware Tools and can be quite handy, especially if networking is not available or you want to go through a single management interface such as using the vSphere API.

How to get notifications when a component on the VMware HCL changes?

11.05.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Last night, I received a pleasant and surprising email, you can see the details in the screenshot below:

This was a surprise because it was something I was tinkering around with back in March (8months ago!) to see if I could some how generate notifications when changes were being made to a specific component/device on the VMware HCL also known as the VCG (VMware Compatibility Guide). I suspect many of you have used the VMware HCL at least once if not many more times and as you can imagine, it would be nice to be able to get notifications or alerts when something has changed for a particular component or device that you might care about.

I was thinking about this problem because at the time I was interested in receiving updates on a particular VSAN disk controller. While browsing through the HCL, I had noticed there was an RSS feed icon located on the upper right hand corner for each component/device as shown in the screenshot below.

I thought maybe I could do something interesting with that? I decided to use one of my favorite SaaS services IFTTT (If This, Then That) which I have blogged about in the past on how to send SMS notifications using vCenter Server Alarms. I found an RSS to Email IFTTT recipe and created a notification based off of one of the Intel RAID Controllers by specifying the RSS feed URL.

I knew this was going to be a bit difficult to test given the HCL does not get updated that frequently and even if it does, I have to be monitoring the right device that received the update. I completely forgot about this recipe until yesterday when I had received the email stating an update had been made to this device. I guess it worked after all 😀 If there specific things you care about on the VMware HCL and you want to be able to receive notifications for any updates, you can create several IFTTT recipes that can either send you an email or notify you through some other method. I think this is a pretty nifty trick instead of continuously checking the VMware HCL every so often for changes, unless you are looking for brand new component/device that has not been added to the HCL.

Want to run ESXi on an Apple MacBook Pro, MacBook Air & iMac? #YesYouCan!

11.04.2014 by William Lam // 35 Comments

We all know that ESXi runs pretty flawlessly (for the most part) on Apple Mac Pro's (5,1 & 6,1) and Apple Mac Mini's (5,x & 6,x), but what about when it comes to consumer laptops/desktops like a MacBook Pro/Air and even the iMacs? As you probably have guessed from the the title, you can run ESXi on any of these systems (which has been made easier with the latest ESXi release), in fact over the weekend I had some fun with some of the Apple hardware I had at my disposal.

UPDATE (05/18/22) - ESXi 7.0 Update 3d works out of the box with the 27" iMac 18,3 (2017) model

27" iMac 18,3
27" iMac 12,1
13" MacBook Pro 7,1
15" MacBook Pro 8,2
13" MacBook Air 6,2

One of the issues I have encountered in the past when trying to install ESXi on my 15" MacBook Pro 8,2 (shown in the center of the picture) is that the keyboard (both the on-board and USB) would stop functioning once the ESXi installer started up. I could never figure out why and to be honest, I never really looked into the problem. I recently found out this issue has been resolved with the latest ESXi 5.5 Update Patch03 which also enables support for the new Mac Pro 6,1 and other bug fixes. It was good to learn from one of my readers, that the keyboard issue has been fixed using the latest 5.5u2 Patch03 image. If you look below, I actually went through and installed the latest ESXi release on each of these platforms which were all straight forward using a bootable USB key except for MacBook Air 6,2 which required adding the iovDisableIR=true boot option which I have blogged about here.

Whether you need to run ESXi on server grade hardware like an Apple Mac Pro or a tiny and lower power platform like the Apple Mac Mini or a consumer laptop/desktop like MacBook Pro/Air or an iMac where ESXi can be available wherever you go which is great for frequent travelers. As you can see, you have plenty of options for running ESXi on Apple hardware!

MacBook Pro 7,1

MacBook Pro 8,2

MacBook Air 6,2

iMac 12,1

iMac 18,3