William Lam

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 6: Customizing VCSA's DCUI

04.21.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

For those of you who have deployed the latest VCSA 6.0, you may have noticed that it now includes a DCUI interface similar to that of ESXi. Just like ESXi, it provides some basic functionality such as network configuration, restarting of the management interface, enabling SSH/Shell access and viewing support logs. For some customers, there is a mandatory requirement in terms of compliance to be able to display a security or warning banner prior to logging into a system which can also include interactive console UI's like the DCUI.

With ESXi, it was possible to customize the DCUI as seen in the screenshot below (more serious customizations are used in customer environments of course). For more details, please take a look at this blog post here.

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Collection of VMware Project Photon & Lightwave Resources/Links

04.20.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Today is a very exciting day for VMware and later this morning, the new Cloud Native Apps team under Kit Colbert will be hosting an online event (replayed of the event will be posted here) to talk more about Next-Generation Apps on VMware as well as diving into more details on two specific initiatives that have recently been open sourced: Project Photon and Lightwave. In anticipation of the flood of information, I thought it would be useful to aggregate all the resources, links and articles in a single place for ease of consumption. This page will be updated through out the day, let me know if there is anything I am missing.

Cloud Native Apps Team

Official Blog Announcement: Cloud-Native Apps: Making the Developer a First-Class User of the Datacenter
Official Twitter: @cloudnativeapps
Follow Cloud Native Apps members on Twitter using this CNA List: https://twitter.com/lamw/lists/vmware-cloud-native-apps1
VMware Open Source GitHub: http://vmware.github.io/

Photon

Photon is an open-source lightweight Linux container host runtime optimized for running containers optimized for VMware’s hypervisor.

VMware Official Blog Announcement: http://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/introducing-photon/
YouTube Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA6flb7otNg
Github: https://vmware.github.io/photon/
Twitter: @vmwarephoton
VMTN Community Forum: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/devops/project-photon
Google Group for Developers: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/vmware-photon-dev
Google Group for Announcements: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/vmware-photon-announce
FAQ: https://github.com/vmware/photon/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Questions

Lightwave

Lightwave is an open-source container identity and access control solution.

VMware Official Blog Announcement: http://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/introducing-lightwave
YouTube Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWmE_Rl3ELc
Github: https://vmware.github.io/lightwave/
Twitter: @vmwarelightwave
VMTN Community Forum: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/devops/project-lightwave

Partner Integration News:

CoreOS - VMware Ships rkt and Supports App Container Spec
HashiCorp - Vagrant Up and Running with VMware’s Project Photon
Mesosphere - We’re tackling container security at scale with VMware
Pivotal - Lattice – Container Clustering Simplified

Community Blog Articles

Josh Gray - Introducing VMware Project Photon
Andrew Mauro - VMware cloud-native applications vision
Vladan SEGET - VMware Cloud-Native Applications: Lightwave, Photon and more…
Forbes - VMware Introduces New Open Source Projects To Enable The Microservices Future
Chris Mutcher - Thoughts on the VMware Project Photon Announcement
Eric Wright - Fire Photon Torpedoes! Getting Started with VMware Photon Linux
The Register - VMware fires Photon torpedo – a homegrown Linux for microservices
Virtualization Review - VMware Launches Two Open Source Container Projects
TechRepublic - New VMware open-source tools make Docker safe for the enterprise
ComputerWorld - VMware preps its virtualization stack for Docker
InformationWeek - VMware Rides Container Wave With Open Source Projects
ITWorld - VMware prepares its virtualization stack for Docker
SDX Central - VMware Creates Its Own Linux OS for Containers
MartijnBaeck - Project Photon and Lightwave, the start of a new VMware era
Scott Lowe - Running Photon on Fusion via Vagrant
Anthony Spiteri - VMware Photon: vCloud Air Network Deployment
Melissa Palmer - Lightwave and Photon Measured from a Rocket, VMware Enhances Cloud-Native Apps
Jacob Ludriks - Trying out Docker with VMWare Photon and Docker CLI for Windows
Romain Decker - Getting Started with VMware Project Photon

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 5: New method of patching the VCSA/PSC

04.17.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

In previous releases of the VCSA, patching and updating of the VCSA was performed through what was known as the VAMI interface which provided both a UI as well as a command-line which I have blogged about here. The simplest and easiest method was of course using the UI which just required opening a browser to https://[VCSA]:5480 as seen in the screenshot below.

UPDATE (09/04/15) - In vSphere 6.0 Update 1, URL based patching is now available. You can find more details here.

In the VCSA 6.0, the old VAMI UI interface no longer exists and to update/patch the VCSA you will need to use the appliancesh command-line interface. There is a command called "software-packages" which is used to update/patch the software on the VCSA. This information is also documented here.

VMware just recently released a patch update to vSphere 6.0 and one of the updates is applicable to VCSA (Embedded) and VC/PSC (External) as noted in this VMware KB 211640. There are two patches (Third Party & Bug/Security Fix) which are available as an ISO which can be downloaded from here.

Before you can apply the patch/update, you will need to mount the patch ISO to your VCSA/PSC using either the vSphere C#/Web Client as you would with any other ISO. The second step is to login to the VCSA/PSC and if you have disable the appliancesh, you just need to type "appliancesh" and you will be prompted to login with your root credentials.

Once logged into the applianesh, the software-packages supports two options:

Stage patches from ISO and then install
Stage patches from ISO and install at a later time

If you wish to perform the update/patch in a single step by staging and installing, you can run the following command:

software-packages install --iso --acceptEulas

If you wish to only stage the patches but not install, you can do so by running the following command:

software-packages stage --iso --acceptEulas

Once you are ready to install the staged patches, you will need to run the following command:

software-packages install --staged