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OVF Runtime Environment

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I recently noticed a trend of questions from various users about extracting specific bits of information such as the version of ESXi that's running or the MoRef ID of the VM, all while within the guestOS. I had already written an article about this topic awhile back called How to extract host information from within a VM? but it seems like there is still a continued interest to easily obtain this information about the underlying vSphere infrastructure from within the guestOS.

I came across another method while researching a different topic which is to use the vApp property of a VM called the OVF runtime environment. This is a feature that has been around since the early days of vSphere 4.x, if not earlier which provides a mechanism to retrieve some of this information as well as custom properties. The OVF feature provides users with the capability to pass in any type of metadata information such as application start up parameters, network configuration, password management, etc. directly into the guestOS for flexible guest customization.

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That's so cool! Running ESXi 5.0 & 5.1 on Apple Mac Mini

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Those of you who follow me on twitter should know that I recently got my hands on an Apple Mac Mini Server (Thanks Randy K.) and are probably thinking I would install Apple OSX on the Mini. Nope! I am actually running vSphere ESXi 5.0 or 5.1 on the Mac Mini!

UPDATE (12/21): Yo no longer need to create a customized ESXi ISO for Apple Mac Mini, the necessary drivers are now included in the new ESXi 5.0 Update 2 and will work out of the box. Please take a look at this article for more details.

UPDATE (01/18): To run ESXi 5.1 on Mac Mini 5,1 or 5,3 please follow the same steps outlined below but for an ESXi 5.1 ISO image. If you are trying to run ESXi 5.0 or 5.1 on the new 2012 Apple Mac Mini 6,2 please refer to this blog post for the instructions.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Use at your own risk.

Note: I did not have a spare monitor at home and luckily the Mac Mini has a DVI output which I was able to connect to my 46" TV. Nothing like ESXi on the big screen 🙂

Even though this is not officially supported by VMware, it is still a very cool solution and the Mac Mini is great form factor for a vSphere home lab. I also want to mention that this was only possible with the research from the folks over at Paraguin Consulting who initially blogged about the process needed to get ESXi 5 running on a Mac Mini. I would highly recommend you check out their blog post which provides additional details as well as a step by step installation guide including screenshots for each step.

I did not have access to an Apple Super Drive which is what the Paraguin folks used in their installation guide, as they thought formatting a USB key would have taken too long ... and who has a CD burner these days? 😉 There is also an additional step that is needed to get network connectivity which requires the user to manually install a network driver on the ESXi host.

I decided to go down the route of using a USB key to perform the installation and using a spare 1GB USB key, I created a custom ESXi installation that included the network driver which allows for network connectivity during and after the installation.

What you will need:

Step 1 - Extract the offline bundle "tg3-3.120h.v50.2-offline_bundle-547149.zip" from Broadcom zip file

Step 2 - Use Image Builder to add the Broadcom driver and create a custom ESXi 5 ISO (steps taken from this VMware KB article)

# Add the ESXi 5.0 Update 1 Offline Bundle

Add-EsxSoftwareDepot "C:\VMware-ESXi-5.0.0-623860-depot.zip"

# Add the Broadcom Offline VIB

Add-EsxSoftwareDepot "C:\tg3-3.120h.v50.2-offline_bundle-547149.zip"

# Create a new Image Profile (in example, I'm using the full version w/tools)

New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile "ESXi-5.0.0-623860-standard" -name "ESXi50u1-Custom"

# Add the broadcom driver to our Image Profile

Add-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile "ESXi50u1-Custom" -SoftwarePackage "net-tg3"

# Create an ISO from our custom Image Profile

Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile "ESXi50u1-Custom" -ExportToISO -filepath C:\VMware-ESXi-5.0u1-Custom.iso

Step 3 - Plug in a USB key into your system and run UNetbootin which will take the custom ISO we just created and make it bootable on the USB key

Step 4 - Finally, power on your Mac Mini and plug in the USB key. You can either hold the "Alt/Option" key while the system is booting and select the EFI volume OR just plug the USB key and the ESXi installer should automatically start up.

After a few minutes, you should now have ESXi 5 running on your Mac Mini, here is my setup:

Note: If you wish to add a custom kickstart file so it automatically installs and configures the host, take a look at this blog post for the details. If you want the Mac Mini to automatically boot from USB without having to press the "Alt/Option" key after installation, you can set the default boot device by following this article here.

Since you are running ESXi on Apple hardware, you can also create Mac OSX Virtual Machines (10.5 Server and 10.6 Server) and with the latest release of vSphere 5.0 Update 1, OSX 10.7 (Lion) is now officially supported. To install OSX 10.7 as a VM, make sure you follow the instructions here.

Here is a screenshot of running OSX Lion 64bit as a VM running on ESXi 5 running on a Mac Mini 😀

If you are looking to refresh your vSphere home lab, definitely consider looking at the Mac Mini, which can get up to a max of 16GB of memory. Also if you are wondering if other people are doing this, I would recommend you check out Christopher Well's vSamarai blog here which details his experience using the Mac Mini as well as voting for his VMworld CFP which will also include topic about running ESXi on Mac Mini.

I want to thank Randy K. again for lending me the Mac Mini, you rock dude! Hopefully this will not be the last article about the Mac Mini 😉

Additional Resources:

How to Deploy ESXi 5 Using Razor & Puppet

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Earlier this week the extraordinary uber super star Nicholas Weaver released a new open source project that he's been working on called Razor (not related to vShaving). I would highly recommend you check out his blog post here for more details about the project. Since Razor deals with Automation which I am always interested, I decided to give Razor a try and see how easy it is to install, configure and deploy.

I also want to mention that this was my first time using Puppet and though there are some videos and guides, it still may not be trivial for new users on what is needed. I thought I walk you through the steps I took to quickly stand up several ESXi 5 hosts in minutes using Razor.

Step 1 - Install Ubuntu Precise (Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS) which will be your Razor server

Step 2 - For a clean installation of Precise, you will need two additional packages: git and make as well as Puppet. Using the following command, it will pull down the latest updates as well as adding the apt.puppetlabs.com repot to install Puppet:
Note: Thanks to Nan Liu for this quick snippet!

Step 3 - You will need to change the ownership of puppet module directory by running the following command:

chown -R puppet:puppet /etc/puppet/modules

Step 4 -  To verify that you have successfully installed Puppet 2.7.14, you can run the following command which should return you the version:

puppet --version

Step 5 -  Now you will install the Razor module using puppet by running the following command:

puppet module install puppetlabs/razor

Step 6 - Next you will initialize and setup Razor by running the following command (this will take a few minutes to complete):

puppet apply /etc/puppet/modules/razor/tests/init.pp --verbose

Step 7 -  Now to verify that Razor has been properly installed, we will go ahead and run it and it should return you the usage options. The path to the razor command is under /opt/razor/bin/razor and we will go ahead and add it to our system path so we can just run "razor". Run the following commands:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/razor/bin
razor

Step 8 -  Finally we also need to ensure that the Razor web services is running, this is currently a known issue which hopefully will be fixed very soon. By default, the web service should automatically start by itself, but currently you need to manually start it. You can run the following commands to verify the status and then start it:

/opt/razor/bin/razor_daemon.rb status
/opt/razor/bin/razor_daemon.rb start

Step 9 - When you power on your host, Razor will need to load a micro-kernel (MK) image for it to register with the Razor server and provide information about your bare metal host or VM. The following command will download and import the MK ISO image into Razor:

wget https://github.com/downloads/puppetlabs/Razor/rz_mk_dev-image.0.8.8.0.iso
razor image add mk ./rz_mk_dev-image.0.8.8.0.iso

Step 10 - Razor automatically comes with a TFTP server, you just need to have a DHCP server which will forward the request to the Razor server. I will assume you have or know how to setup a DHCP server and here is an example of what my DHCP configuration  looks like for several "virtual" ESXi Shells which I plan on provisioning with ESXi 5:

Note: You just need to set the next-server stanza to your Razor server and the filename to "pxelinux.0" which exists on Razor server

Step 11 - To verify we have no nodes that have registered with Razor, we can run the following command:

razor node

Step 12 - To deploy ESXi 5 on our hosts, we will need a copy of the ESXi 5.0 ISO. In this example I am importing the latest ESXi 5.0 Update 1 image using the following command (you will need to download and upload the ISO to your Razor server via SCP/WinSCP):

razor image add esxi VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.0.0.update01-623860.x86_64.iso

Note: You will notice the type for the image is "esxi" versus "os" if you are planning on installing regular guestOSes.

Step 13 - Next we will create a Model which describes an ESXi 5 install and it's configurations. You will need to make a note of the UUID of the ISO we just uploaded from the previous step. Run the following command to create the model:

razor model add template=vmware_esxi_5 label=install_esxi5 image_uuid=5JC9GT8GToMak0DD3Uivke

Note: You will also be asked to fill out a few properties such as the license and password for your ESXi host as well as the network information. If you are interested in the kickstart that is being used for the ESXi deployments, you can take a look at /opt/razor/lib/project_razor/model/esxi/5/kickstart.erb. If you would like to adjust the kickstart file, be sure to take a look here.

Step 14 - Okay, we are almost done! Now we just need to create a policy which binds the model to some set of attributes, such as the tags on our ESXi hosts that we wish to build. In my lab, I created a few vESXi hosts using steps found here and then creating a few Linked Clones so I did not have to waste any storage space using this script here. If you are using a vESXi host, by default you will get the vmware_vm tag which is what our base our policy on. Run the following command to create the policy:

razor policy add template=vmware_hypervisor label=install_esxi5 model_uuid=2w1QEGbkoXDELc6ndXb13A broker_uuid=none tags=vmware_vm enabled=true

Note: You will need the UUID of the model you just created which is highlighted in blue in the previous screenshot when creating the policy.

Step 15 - We can check our policy and confirm there are no nodes registered to Razor again, by running the following commands:

razor policy
razor node

Step 16 - Now you are ready to power on your hosts and they should automatically get an IP Address from your DHCP server and forward your request to Razor and perform an iPXE boot.

Step 17 - Once the hosts have booted up the MK image and register with Razor, you should be able to run the following commands to see the nodes and their states:

razor policy
razor policy active

As you can see from the screenshots, I have 5 nodes that have registered and 4 of them are already in the postinstall process and the ESXi installation should be completely very shortly. If you head over to your hosts, you see that ESXi is completely installed and ready for use:

So there you have it, you can quickly provision from bare metal to a fully functional working ESXi 5 hosts literally within minutes (after the config setup of course). I still think there could be some improvements on the CLI help options (though Razor is still in beta), it was not always intuitive on the options for the commands and luckily I had Nick's video and the Wiki to help out with the options. All in all, Razor was very easy to use (especially for a first timer like myself) and though I was not able to get the vCenter Server modules to work ... since they haven not been released yet ;). I am really looking forward to seeing those modules get released soon by Puppetlabs.

If you are interested in learning more about Razor, I highly recommend you check out Nick's blog here as well as the Razor project's Wiki on Github here and help provide feedback or even contribute code back to the project. Great job again Nick and team!