William Lam

Automating the silent installation of Site Recovery Manager 5.8 w/Embedded vPostgres DB

10.28.2014 by William Lam // 6 Comments

Last week I had a nice email exchange with Ben Meadowcroft who is the Product Manager for VMware's Site Recovery Manager. While chatting with Ben, I learned about new feature that I was not aware of in the latest SRM 5.8 release which now supports an embedded vPostgres database. Not only does this greatly simplify the installation and not requiring an external database like Microsoft SQL or Oracle, it is also on par in terms scalability with the external databases which is great for customers. I definitely like this improvement in the SRM installation and making it easier to evaluate and POC without requiring a large resource footprint.

UPDATE (11/09/15) - For silent installation of SRM 6.x, please take a look at this article here as some of the install params have changed.

In addition to new database feature, I also learned that SRM supports a silent mode installation which I was not aware of before either. I figured this might come in handy for those needing to automate an SRM deployment given you will need at least two installation: one for the protection site and one for the recovery site. I did not see much documentation on this topic and it has been awhile since I have played with SRM, I thought this would be a good opportunity for some automation goodness as well as checking out some of the new SRM 5.8 features including VSAN support as well as the new vSphere Web Client integration.

In my lab, I wanted to run the a minimal setup and the least amount of Windows 🙂 With that, I was able to use two VCSA, 2 SRM hosts running on Windows 2008 R2 and six Nested ESXi hosts as shown in the diagram below:

To perform a silent installation of SRM, you need to specify a list of 35 parameters to the actual executable which is quite daunting and can also be quite error prone. It actually took me a few tries before I was able to get it working and I wanted to make easier so that anyone can just consume it. I decided to create a simple Windows batch script called install_srm.bat which wraps all the required parameters in a set of variables that can easily be modified by anyone. Out of the 35, only 31 of the parameters can be edited and of those only 15 is really required to be tweaked (which is clearly noted in the script) but also shown below:

SRM_INSTALLER - The full path to the SRM 5.8 installer
DR_TXT_VCHOSTNAME - vCenter Server IP/Hostname
DR_TXT_VCUSR - vCenter Server Username
DR_TXT_VCPWD - vCenter Server Password
VC_CERTIFICATE_THUMBPRINT - vCenter Server SSL SHA1 Thumbprint
DR_TXT_LSN - SRM Local Site Name
DR_TXT_ADMINEMAIL - SRM Admin Email Address
DR_CB_HOSTNAME_IP - SRM Server IP/Hostname
DR_TXT_CERTPWD - SSL Certificate Password
DR_TXT_CERTORG - SSL Certificate Organization Name
DR_TXT_CERTORGUNIT - SSL Certification Organization Unit Name
DR_EMBEDDED_DB_DSN - SRM DB DSN Name
DR_EMBEDDED_DB_USER - SRM DB Username
DR_EMBEDDED_DB_PWD - SRM DB Password
DR_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME - Windows System Account to run SRM Service

Note: To retrieve the vCenter Server SSL Certificate Thumbprint, you can either view the details using a regular web browser as shown in the screenshot below

or you can run the following command on a UNIX/Linux using the openssl utility to extract the thumbprint:

echo -n | openssl s_client -connect [VC-IP-ADDRESS]:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint -sha1

Depending on the number of SRM installations you require, you will need to modify the script to perform those additional deployments. As you can see below, I have my two SRM sites implemented. I have also gone ahead and paired both my SRM setups as well as deploy and configure the vSphere Replication 5.8 using the vSphere Web Client. I definitely recommend checking out the latest SRM 5.8 release if you have not already and you may also want to consider using the embedded vPostgres database for future SRM installation to help simplify the deployment and management of SRM.

For those of you who are interested in the variable mappings to the SRM UI installer (which is pretty straight forward), I took screenshots of each step and mapped them for your convenience.

ESXi Support for 2014 Apple Mac Mini 7,1

10.25.2014 by William Lam // 88 Comments

I have received a number of inquires asking whether ESXi can be installed on the latest 2014 Apple Mac Mini 7,1. Unfortunately, some early reports have indicated issues trying to get the latest version of ESXi installed on the Mac Mini and the results are also the same using old releases of ESXi as well. As of right now, VMware Engineering is unable to comment on the issue until they can get their hands on a the latest Mac Mini in house for investigation. If you happen to own the latest Mac Mini and live in the Bay Area and wish to help expedite the process by donating your system for testing, feel free to drop me a note. I will update this blog with new findings as they are made available regarding ESXi and the new Mac Mini's. The answer is yes, you can install the latest release of ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 and to be able to get the SATA HDD to show up, you will need to install a custom VIB shown below.

UPDATE 3 (11/7) - For those just wanting the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 + SATA VIB ISO, I have created ESXi-5.5u2p03-MacMini-7-1-HDD.iso that you can just download and install.

UPDATE 2 (11/6) - Thanks to one of our CPD Engineers Charles Monnett, we now have a way for ESXi to detect the HDD located in the new Apple Mac Mini 7,1. It turns out there was a new SATA controller that is being used for the HDD and because it's PCI ID (8086:9c03) was unknown, it was not being claimed by the AHCI driver. Once this was added to the driver map files, ESXi could now see the second drive. Of course, I wanted to simplify this for end users, so I have built a new VIB called vghetto-apple-macmini71-hdd.vib that needs to be installed which can be done by using the following command:

esxcli software vib install -v /vghetto-apple-macmini71-hdd.vib -f

Once the VIB has been installed, go ahead reboot for the changes to take affect. We can now run the following command on the ESXi Shell to confirm that we now see both the SSD and HDD disk OR we can do so using the vSphere C# Client:

esxcli storage core device list

UPDATE 1 (11/5) - It looks like an internal team was able to get their hands on the latest Mac Mini 7,1 and using the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 image, they were successfully able to install ESXi, however it only recognized the internal SSD (Samsung based) and not the Fusion drive. This will need to be further investigated on why the other device is not being claimed but it looks like as of now, you can at least get stock ESXi installed and use the SSD.

In the mean time, if you are looking to purchase a Mac Mini to run ESXi, I would highly recommend you take a look at some of the platform changes here and here before deciding to purchase. The most significant change in my opinion is the removal of user replaceable memory with soldered in memory! This means that you will NOT be able to upgrade the units after purchasing and you will need to max out the configuration during the initial purchase with Apple. This is one of the unfortunate changes to the Mac Mini platform and I personally would recommend looking at the last release of the Mac Mini's (Late 2012) which will provide the most bang for the buck. For the old Mac Mini's you will most likely have to look on eBay or even Amazon as they are no longer sold by Apple or their retailers.

Disclaimer: Running ESXi on an Apple Mac Mini is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk

A killer custom Apple Mac Mini setup running VSAN

10.21.2014 by William Lam // 12 Comments

*** This is a guest blog post from Peter Bjork ***

The first time I was briefed on VMware VSAN, I fell in love. I finally knew how I would build my Home Lab.

Let me first introduce myself, my name is Peter Björk and I work at VMware as Lead Specialist within the EMEA EUC Practice. I fortunately have the opportunity to limit my focus on a very few products and truly specialize in these. I cover two products; VMware ThinApp and VMware Workspace Portal and one feature; the Application Publishing feature of VMware Horizon 6. I’m an End-User application kind of guy. That said, you should understand that I’m far from your ESXi and vSphere expert. If you want to keep up with the latest news in the VMware End-User Computing space make sure to follow me on Twitter, my handle is @thepeb. When I’m not a guest blogger, I frequently blog on the official ThinApp and Horizon Tech blogs.

In my role I produce a lot of blog posts and internal enablement material. I perform many tests using early code drops and on a daily basis I run my home lab to deliver live demos. I need a Home Lab that I can trust and that supports all my work tasks. I started building my lab many years ago. It all started with a single mid tower white box, but pretty soon I ran into resource constraints. I started to investigate what my next upgrade would look like.

I had a few requirements:

Keep the noise down
Shouldn’t occupy that much space
Should be affordable
Modular, I do not have money to buy everything upfront so it should be something I could build on top of.
Should be able to run VMware ESXi/vSphere
Should be cool

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