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How to Run WSX as a Standalone

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This weekend I got chance to deploy the new Workstation Technology Preview 2012 in my lab and specifically play with the new WSX feature, which allows you to access your virtual machines from anywhere with just a browser. Currently WSX is only available for the Linux version of Workstation and is bundled together as part of the installer. I wanted to run WSX in one of my management VMs, and did not want the large disk footprint that came with Workstation. I did some digging and found it was quite easy to extract the WSX bits and run it on another Linux system, and in my case I tried it with vMA.

Disclaimer: This is mainly for educational and testing purposes as this is not officially supported by VMware.

The main prerequisite to install WSX is a Linux system that has Python 2.6 installed. You will still need to perform a full installation of Workstation to extract the WSX components, as recommended you can use the latest Ubuntu image.

Note: If you want to install Workstation Tech Preview in a VM, you may get an error for the version of VMware Tools not being up to date. You can by-pass that by running the following command:

VMWARE_FORCE_INSTALL_IN_VM=yes ./VMware-Workstation-Full-e.x.p-646643.i386.bundle

Step 1 - You will need to create a few directories on the destination system in which you will be copying the WSX files to:

mkdir -p /etc/vmware/wsx
mkdir -p /usr/lib/vmware/{setup,scripts,lib,bin}
mkdir -p /var/lib/vmware/wsx/

Step 2 - You will now copy the following directory/files to destination system using scp:

scp /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-wsx-server *protected email*:/usr/lib/vmware/bin
scp /etc/init.d/vmware-wsx-server *protected email*:/etc/init.d
scp /etc/vmware/bootstrap  *protected email*:/etc/vmware
scp -r /usr/lib/vmware/setup *protected email*:/usr/lib/vmware/
scp -r /usr/lib/vmware/scripts *protected email*:/usr/lib/vmware/
scp -r /usr/lib/vmware/lib/python2.6 *protected email*:/usr/lib/vmware/lib

Step 3 - Next you need to re-create the WSX config file which will be stored in /etc/vmware/wsx/config using the following command:

/usr/lib/vmware/lib/python2.6/site-packages/wsx/vmware-wsx-server --generate_config

If you wish to change the default port of 8888, you may edit the file before starting the WSX service.

Step 4 - Finally, you are now ready to start the WSX service by running the following command:

/etc/init.d/vmware-wsx-server start

Note: I ran into an odd issue with the initial login to WSX from the browser, in which I needed to create a secondary account other than the default "vi-admin". You need to login with "vi-admin" first, clear the cookie, so you can login with another user account before you add new servers. This was mainly looking at some of the errors from the logs and performing sqlite dump of WSX db.

Here are a few screenshot of accessing WSX from browser, iPad and iPhone:

The interface was pretty easy to use and it's pretty damn cool to be able to access your desktop from any platform that has a browser! Really looking forward to see where WSX is headed and hopefully it will be available in the future as a standalone installer and also with a logout button 🙂

Congratulations to Chris Greer for Winning Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator

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A week ago, I ran a simple contest to give a way a free copy of  Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator Book. To enter the contest, you just had leave a comment with 5 things you wish or hope to automate using vCenter Orchestrator. I am happy to announce the winner of Cody Bunch's new book is Chris Greer! Congratulations Chris!

Chris's comment was the following:

1). I would like to put a web ui in front of the request process for a vm.
2). I want to call out to other services like request tracker via their rest interface
3). I want to automate vcloud director with automated task like license tracking
4). I want to automate network appliances like load balancers and firewalls when deploying specific templates (like web servers)
5). I want to be able to kick off vco workflows via a soap/rest call to extend current scripts
Bonus: I'd love to configure SRM but I don't think it's integrated yet.

Chris, hopefully the new Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator book will help you accomplish these tasks!

Thank you to those who enter and if you did not win, you should still go and grab a copy of Cody's book (available in Kindle and paper back format) and learn how easy it is to leverage vCO in your vSphere environment.

How to Access USB Storage in ESXi Shell

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While performing some experiments in my home lab, I needed to access a USB storage key directly on my ESXi host (not pass-through to VMs) and found it required a small trick after some tinkering. I thought I share the process in case this comes in handy for others.

Disclaimer: This is mainly for educational and testing purposes as this is not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.

Before I begin, you should know that only USB storage devices formatted with FAT16 can be accessed in the ESXi shell and is applicable to both ESXi 4.1 and 5.0.

Step 1 - Login to ESXi Shell via SSH and disable the USB Arbitrator service (this is automatically enabled by default to allow pass-through of USB devices to your VMs) using the following command: /etc/init.d/usbarbitrator stop

Step 2 - Plug-in your USB device to your ESXi host and you can verify by using the two ESXCLI commands: verifying the storage device using the command: esxcli storage core device list | grep -i usb or viewing the mounted filesystems using the command: esxcli storage filesystem list

Step 3 - Lastly, after you verify the USB device can be seen by the ESXi host, you can of course browse and access your USB device by looking under /vmfs/volumes/

Te re-enable pass-through of USB devices to your VMs, you just need to start the usbarbitrator service.