Automation – Page 190

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

Subscribe to vGhetto Nested ESXi Template Content Library in vSphere 6.0

04.08.2015 by William Lam // 23 Comments

During the early development of vSphere 6.0, one of the features that I got an early sneak preview of was the Content Library which originated from vCloud Director's Content Catalog capability and has now been pushed down into the core vSphere platform as part of VCD's "Convergence" plan.

Although there are some initial limitations with this first release of Content Library such as not being able to mount an ISO directly from the Content Library as example, which I do agree it should have just worked and not requiring a manual datastore browse for this operation to work. I know the Engineering team is aware of this as it was something our team had also provided feedback among other things, so hopefully this will be fixed very shortly.

Having said that, I do see a huge potential with the Content Library and all the interesting use cases it can enable not only for vSphere but also for other products such as vRealize Automation as well as vCloud Air. One area that caught my attention when I first heard about Content Library is the the fact that the publishing and subscription capability works over simple HTTP(s). I immediately had a light-bulb moment and thought would it not be cool if you could have a custom Content Library that would be hosted on some external cloud storage such as Amazon S3 as en example and be able to publish that so others could subscribe to it in their vSphere environment?

Fortunately, because Content Library works over standard HTTP(s) and with the help of one of the Content Library Engineers I was able to create my very own vGhetto Nested ESXi Template Content Library for both vSphere 6.0 and vCloud Directory based environments which is currently being hosted on Amazon S3.

vSphere: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vghetto-content-library/lib.json
vCD: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vghetto-content-library-vcd/lib.json

The library contains all of my Nested ESXi / VSAN OVF Templates that I have created over the years and by publishing them in in my public Content Library, anyone can now easily subscribe and pull down the latest OVF templates to deploy directly in their vSphere/vCD environment. You no longer have to manually download the OVFs and as I add new content, the Content Library will automatically synchronize the changes to your local environment.

The vGhetto Nested ESXi Template Content Library currently contains the following 7 OVF's which total to 1.43MB:

Nested-ESXi-3-Node-VSAN-6.0-All-Flash-Template
Nested-ESXi-3-Node-VSAN-6.0-Template
Nested-ESXi-3-Node-VSAN-Template
Nested-ESXi-32-Node-VSAN-Template (not available when subscribing from VCD)
Nested-ESXi-6-Node-VSAN-6.0-FD-Template
Nested-ESXi-64-Node-VSAN-6.0-Template (not available when subscribing from VCD)
Nested-ESXi-VM-Template

Here are the instructions for subscribing to my vGhetto Content Library using the vSphere 6.0 Web Client:

Step 1 - In the main Home page, click on the Content Library icon

Step 2 - Create a new Content Library which will be used to subscribe to my vGhetto Content Library.

Step 3 - Select "Subscribed content library" and enter the following URL: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vghetto-content-library/lib.json and make sure to select "Download all library content immediately". There is currently a limitation in the way the metadata is read from OVFs that prevents the on-demand setting to be used when subscribing to 3rd party Content Libraries.

Step 4 - Select the storage which will be backing your Content Library. This can be either a local filesystem path on your vCenter Server or by using a vSphere Datastore.

Step 5 - If the new Content Library had been successfully created, the content will start to synchronize to your local system and once the OVF/VM icon appears, then you know the Nested ESXi / VSAN OVFs templates are ready to be deployed in your environment as seen in the screenshot below.

Note: You will notice that even though we are pulling down all seven OVF templates, they are only consume a measly 1.43MB as these are empty VMs shells and I am also using the OVF Dynamic Disks feature which allows you to specify the size of the VMDK upon deployment.

UPDATE (4/24) - It turns out that 3rd Party Content Libraries can also be subscribed from within vCloud Director but because it does not support Dynamic Disks, the synchronized will fail. I have created a separate library specifically optimized for vCD which you can find the URL at the top and you can then subscribe to my vGhetto Content Library as seen in the screenshot below. You will notice that the 32 and 64 Node VSAN Template is not available and the reason for this is that apparently there is a limitation in the number of elements it can parse.

This is a pretty powerful feature in my opinion and I can already see custom content libraries not only from VMware but also from our partner eco-systems providing their latest solutions (Virtual Appliances) as well as other file content as Content Library can store pretty much anything. In a future blog post, I will go through the details on how you can create your own custom Content Library, so stay tune. In the mean time, if you are using vSphere 6.0 and and would like to be able to quickly pull down the latest Nested ESXi / VSAN OVF templates, be sure to subscribe to my vGhetto Content Library!

Easily automate ESXi 6.0 Active Directory join using domainjoin-cli

04.06.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

A nice little enhancement that I recently came across in ESXi 6.0 is the inclusion of the Likewise utility called domainjoin-cli which allows you to join a system to an Active Directory Domain. Previously, if you wanted to automate the process of joining an ESXi host to an Active Directory Domain, you had to either manually configure it using the vSphere Web/Client, using Host Profiles or creating an external script using the vSphere APIs.

All of these options were mostly executed during the post-provisioning process and if you wanted to include Active Directory configuration as part of the provisioning process, you may have had to resort to something like calling into the vSphere MOB within a Kickstart script as I had shown back in 2011 in this article here. The solution I came up with was not ideal but it worked for those that did not want to have additional steps after initial provisioning.

With the domainjoin-cli utility now included in the ESXi Shell of ESXi 6.0, you easily automate the joining an Active Directory Domain with just a couple of lines added to your Kickstart or provisioning scripts. Before you can use the command-line utility, you will need to ensure the Likewise Service Manager Daemon is running by running the following two commands which will start the service and also ensure the service automatically starts up:

/etc/init.d/lwsmd start
chkconfig lwsmd on

Next, to join to your Active Directory Domain, you will need to specify the following 3 parameters:

join - Specifying the operation is a join versus a leave
AD Domain Name - Active Directory Domain to join
AD Username - Active Directory username to join to the domain
AD Password - Active Directory password to join to the domain (optional as you will be prompted if it is not specified)

Here is an example of what the command looks like joining my Active Directory Domain in my lab:

/usr/lib/vmware/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli join primp-industries.com administrator [PASSWORD]

You should see a success message if the ESXi host was successfully joined to the Active Directory Domain and you will want to reboot your ESXi host for the changes to take full effect. This is definitely a simpler method to include into an ESXi Kickstart script to automate the joining of an Active Directory Domain and hopefully you will find this handy when using ESXi 6.0.