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Quick Tip - Cloning Mac OS X VMs with unique serial numbers in vCloud Director

04.24.2015 by William Lam // 2 Comments

This week I learned about a really cool use case from one of our customers who is using vCloud Director to provision Mac OS X virtual machines to their end users both from a development standpoint but also for troubleshooting and demo purposes for their field and QA organizations. Instead of having to manage hardware assignment across large user base, they have built a completely self-service environment for requesting access to Mac OS X VMs, which I thought was pretty neat.

One issue that they were running into was that when they deployed a Mac OS X VM from their vCD Catalog which is a clone operation, they found that the cloned instances contained the exact same serial number as the source VM and that was giving them some problems. I had pinged a few of our engineers to see if they had any ideas and it turns out that the Mac OS X serial number is generated based off of the uuid.bios property of a VM.

mac-osx-serial
Once I found this out, I knew the exact problem because this was something I had seen before when I had worked with vCD. When deploying a vApp from a Catalog in vCD, the bios.uuid property of the VMs are all kept identical and this would explain why the serial number was the same. This behavior is documented in this VMware KB 2002506 and it also includes a solution to the problem. Once the customer made the change, they were now able to deploy new Mac OS X instances with uniquely generated serial numbers. For regular vSphere or Fusion environments, when cloning a Mac OS X VM, the serial number should always be unique as this problem is only specific to vCD. I should also note that once the serial number has been generated, changing the existing bios.uuid will not force the serial number to change.

Categories // Apple, Automation, ESXi, Fusion, vSphere Tags // apple, bios.uuid, mac, osx

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

vmware-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/
    • Instructions to deploy on vSphere 5.5 & 6.0
    • Instructions to deploy on Workstation/Fusion
    • Instructions to deploy on vCloud Air
    • Instructions to deploy on Google Compute Engine
  • 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

vmware-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

Categories // Automation, Cloud Native, Docker Tags // cloud native apps, container, DevOps, LightWave, 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.

patching-vcsa-6.0-0
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.

patching-vcsa-6.0-2
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.

patching-vcsa-6.0-1
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

patching-vcsa-6.0-3
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

  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 1: What install & deployment parameters did I use?
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 2: What is my SSO Domain Name & Site Name?
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 3: Finding all deployed Platform Services Controller
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 4: Finding all deployed vCenter Servers
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 5: New method of patching the VCSA
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 6: Customizing VCSA’s DCUI
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 7: Connecting to SSO/PSC using JExplorer
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 8: Useful ldapsearch queries for vmdird
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 9: Creating & managing SSO users using dir-cli
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 10: Automating SSO Admin configurations
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 11: Automate SSO Admin password change
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 12: New methods of downloading Support Bundles for VCSA / PSC

Categories // Automation, VCSA, vSphere 6.0 Tags // appliancesh, platform service controller, psc, software-packages, vami, VCSA, vcva

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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