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Lossless OVF Export in vSphere 5.1 & vCloud Director 5.1

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Did you know in vSphere 5.1, the new vSphere Web Client now provides a lossless OVF export feature for virtual machines? Previous to this, when you exported a virtual machine only the basic configurations were captured to ensure the virtual machine could be re-imported into another environment that supports OVF. The virtual machine's "virtual hardware personality" such as the BIOS UUID, MAC addresses, VMware specific advanced settings (Extra Configurations), boot order, PCI slot numbers, etc. were not captured as part of the export.

One of the main reasons for doing this is to ensure greater portability of the virtual machine across different environments. By having some of these specific properties tied to the virtual machine, it could limit where a virtual machine could be imported to. However, if you wish to preserve some of these settings during an export, you now have a new advanced option in vSphere 5.1 to specify additional configurations to capture for an OVF export.

When you select the "Enable advanced options" box, you will be provided with a list of configurations that you can preserve and export with the virtual machine.

Note: As the warning message states, only enable the configurations that you absolutely need, else you should stick to the defaults to ensure you have the best portability for your virtual machine export.

There is also a similar feature in vCloud Director 5.1 for vAppTemplates. When you initiate a download of a vAppTemplate, you now have an additional check box to "Preserve identity information" of the vAppTemplate prior to export. This is just a single check box for vCloud Director, you can not specify which configurations you want to preserve.

All these new OVF features can also be accessed with the latest ovftool 3.0.1 release which includes several new enhancements as well as support for both vSphere 5.1 and vCloud Director 5.1. You can find more details in the ovftool 3.0.1 user guide, but here is a summary of what's new in this release.

What Is New in OVF Tool 3.0.1

  • Support for vSphere 5.1 and 5.0.  
  • Support for vCloud Director 5.1, 1.5, and partial support for vCloud Director 1.0
  •    The following new ovftool options: --annotation, --exportFlags, --shaAlgorithm, --sourcePEM, --targetPEM, --vCloudTemplate, --sourceSSLThumbprint, --targetSSLThumbprint, --fencedMode, --noSSLVerify, --vService.

Feature Highlights

  • Full support for vCloud Director 1.5 and 5.1
  • Includes full OVF 1.0, and 1.1 support and backward-compatible mode for importing existing OVF 0.9 packages
  • Supports both import and generation of OVA packages (OVA is part of the OVF standard, and contains all the files of a virtual machine or vApp in a single file.)
  • Directly converts between any vSphere, vCloud Director, VMX, or OVF source format to any vSphere, vCloud Director, VMX, or OVF target format
  • Accesses OVF sources using HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP, or from a local file 
  • Deploys and exports vApp configurations on vSphere 4.0 targets and later and on vCloud Director 1.5 targets and later
  • Provides options to power on a VM or vApp after deployment, and to power off a virtual machine or vApp before exporting (caution advised)
  • Show information about the content of any source in probe mode
  • Provides context sensitive error messages for vSphere and vCloud Director sources andtargets, showing possible completions for common errors, such as an incomplete vCenter inventory path or missing datastore and network mappings
  • Provides an optional output format to support scripting when another program calls OVFTool
  • Uses new optimized upload and download API (optimized for vSphere 4.0 and later)
  • Signs OVF packages and validates OVF package signatures
  • Validates XML Schema of OVF 1.0 and OVF 1.1 descriptors
  • Import and export of OVF packages into a vApprun1.0 workspace. For more information about vApprun, see http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vapprun.

A Pretty Cool Method of Upgrading to ESXi 5.1

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I recently came across an interesting article by Andreas Peetz which shows you how to patch an ESXi host using an image profile that is directly available on VMware's online depot within the ESXi shell. I knew that VMware had online depots for use with VUM and Auto Deploy but I was not aware of this particular method, especially directly from the host.

Disclaimer: This method assumes you can install the default ESXi Image Profile with no additional drivers or packages, else you may have connectivity issue after the upgrade. If you still need to customize the ESXi Image Profile before installation, you will still need to use something like Image Builder and then upload that to your online depot.

Note: There are many ways that you can patch/upgrade your ESXi hosts, here is another article that provides more details for command-line only methods.

Before you get started, you will need to make sure that your ESXi host has the httpClient firewall rule enabled, else you will not be able to connect to VMware's online depot. To enable this, run the following ESXCLI command:

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

Also make sure that your ESXi host can reach the following URL (you can specify a proxy if needed):

https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

To view the available ESXi Image Profiles, run the following ESXCLI command (use the --proxy if you need to specify a proxy to reach VMware's online depot):

esxcli software sources profile list -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

If you are able to successfully connect to the online depot, you see a list of all the ESXi Image Profiles that are available to you. You will see two ESXi 5.1 Image Profiles (these were recently published), one with VMware Tools and one without VMware Tools.

Note: Before you begin, make sure you do not have any running VMs and put your host into maintenance mode.

Let's go ahead and upgrade our ESXi 5.0 Update 1 host to latest ESXi 5.1. To install the new Image Profile, run the following command:

esxcli software profile update -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml -p ESXi-5.1.0-799733-standard

This can take a few minutes to complete depending on how fast you can pull down the Image Profile. Once it is done, you will see all the new VIBs that have been updated and you will be asked to reboot for the changes to go into effect and then you will be running ESXi 5.1! Pretty cool IMO!

How To Initiate a Wipe & Shrink Operation On an SE Sparse Based Disk

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In my previous two articles, I showed you how to create your own SE Sparse disks as well as creating new virtual machine Linked Clones leveraging the new SE Sparse disk format. If you recall earlier, one of the features of the SE Sparse disk format is to provide the ability to reclaim unused blocks within the guestOS which is a two step process: wipe and shrink.

Here is a screenshot that describes the process which was taken from the What's New In vSphere 5.1 Storage Whitepaper by my colleague Cormac Hogan. I highly recommend you check out the whitepaper which includes more details about this feature and other storage improvements in vSphere 5.1

The process of kicking off this wipe and shrink operation will be done through an integration with VMware View (a future release from my understanding). Now, it's important to understand that it's not just simply calling these two operations but it is also when they are called. The wipe operation is more CPU intensive as it scans for unused space within the guestOS filesystem and the shrink operation is more I/O intensive as it issues the SCSI unmaps commands. I can only assume that these operations will be scheduled based on the utilization of the guestOS to help reduce the impact to the VM workload.

Now having said that, since the SE Sparse disk format is a feature of the vSphere 5.1 platform, so are both the wipe and shrink operations. Though they are not exposed in the public vSphere API like the SE Sparse disk format, you can still access the private APIs if you know where to look 😉

Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes only, this is not officially supported by VMware. Use at your own risk.

With some help from my good friend the vSphere MOB and some digging, I have located the two vSphere API methods for wipe and shrink operation. Before getting started, ensure you have a VM with at least one SE Sparse disk, else these commands will not be very useful.

Note: In this experiment, I tested the wipe and shrink operation with Windows XP image, this may or may not work on other OSes.

First you will need to search for the VM in question and retrieve it's vSphere MOB URL which is in the format of https://[vcenter-server]/mob/?moid=vm-X where X is the MoRef ID for your VM. You can either navigate through the vSphere MOB or use my MoRef finder script.

Wipe Operation

To issue the wipe API, enter the following URL into your web browser (remember to replace the MoRef ID with the one of your VM)

https://[vcenter-server]/mob/?moid=vm-X&method=wipeDisk

Here is a screenshot of what that looks like if you are able to successfully access the private API:

Go ahead and click on "Invoke Method" which will then execute the wipe operation. If you take a look at the vSphere Web Client, you should now see a new task for the wipe operation.

This can take a bit of time as it scans through the guestOS filesystem for unused space.

Shrink Operation

Once the wipe operation as completed, we then need to issue the shrink API. Enter the following URL into your web browser (remember to replace the MoRef ID with tone of your VM)

https://[vcenter-server]/mob/?moid=vm-X&method=shrinkDisk

Here is a screenshot of what that looks like if you are able to successfully access the private API:

Here you can specify particular disks (requires diskId) that you wish to perform the shrink operation on. If you leave it blank, it will try to shrink all disks associated with your VM. In our example, I will shrink all disks. Go ahead and click on the "Invoke Method" which will kick off the shrink operation. If you go back to the vSphere Web Client, you should now see a shrink task in progress.

Again, this operation can also take some time, but once it has finished, then you have successfully reclaimed any unused blocks within your guestOS.