Cloud Native – Page 17

How to configure shared folders in VMware AppCatalyst?

10.02.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

A widely used feature in VMware's hosted products (Fusion & Workstation) is the shared folders capabilities which allows you to easily share files between the host system and your Virtual Machines. With the latest release of VMware's AppCatalyst TP2, shared folders is now officially supported and can be configured using the AppCatalyst's REST API. Below are the instructions on setting up shared folders for your VMs running in AppCatalyst. Thanks to Fabio for sharing the details.

I will assume that you already have a VM that is running under AppCatalyst. If you do not, you can run the following commands to quickly deploy a new VM called "photon" from the default VMware Photon OS template and retrieve the IP Address assigned to the VM (which we will make use later).

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vm create photon
/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vmpower on photon
/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst guest getip photon

If you have not used AppCatalyst before, be sure to check out this getting started guide here.

Step 1 - Open a terminal and start the AppCatalyst Daemon by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst-daemon

Step 2 - Open a browser to connect to the following URL https://localhost:8080 to access the REST API explorer provided by Swagger.

Step 3 - Expand the POST /vms/{id}/folders which is the API to configure shared folders for a particular VM. You will need to fill in the id property which specifies the name of the VM and the state property defines the shared folder configuration.

Here is an example for creating a shared folder in the guest called "shared-folder" and mapping that to the host folder under /Users/lamw/Development. The flags property specifies how the folder will be accessed by the VM. Currently, there is only one flag implemented which is "4" and means read/write access. In the future there maybe more flags implemented for different types of access.

{
"guestPath":"shared-folder",
"hostPath":"/Users/lamw/Development",
"flags":4
}

Once you have entered the information into the UI, to execute the API request you just need to click on the "Try it out" button at the bottom. If the operation was successful, you should get back a 200 response from the UI.

Note: The guestPath property is not actually a path in the VM but rather the name of the directory which will map to the host shared folder.

Step 4 - We can now login to our VM to confirm that the shared folder has been configured. If you are using the default Photon template, you can login by specifying the default SSH keys included with AppCatalyst and the IP Address of the Photon VM we deployed earlier.

Here is the command to login (be sure to replace with the IP Address from your enviornment):

ssh -i /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/etc/appcatalyst_insecure_ssh_key [email protected]

Step 5 - Once logged in, if we now look under /mnt/hgfs directory, we should now see the shared directory automatically created and mapped to the host shared folder we created earlier.

If you wish to remove shared folders from a VM, you can do so by executing the DELETE /vms/{id}/folders/{folderId} API and specifying the id for both the VM and folder. Hopefully in the future, shared folders can also be easily consumed through the simple AppCatalyst CLI, but for now you can do so using the REST API.

How Wrecking Crew Inc. leveraged vSphere's Instant Clone to instantly provision hundreds of VMs

09.18.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

Okay, Wrecking Crew Inc. is not a real company but a fictitious one that was used during Alan Renouf and Li Zheng's VMworld session, #INF5803 - Deploy Hundreds of VMs Instantly via Forking (aka vSphere Instant Clone). During the session, Wrecking Crew Inc. was described as a modern online gaming company who was about to launch a new product. They found out that their game was going to be more popular than they had originally anticipated and needed to be able to quickly spin up a large number of instances of their game to handle the load.

Though this was a fictional company to help set the stage for the demo, the underlying use case is an actual challenge for many of our customers. One of the examples that Alan used was the traditional Black Friday sale which occurs on the Friday after Thanksgiving in US. As you can imagine, being able to quickly scale up your online application based on customer demand can really give retailers an real edge over their competition. In todays world, waiting a few additional seconds for a site to load can mean the difference between a sale and customer going else where for their business. Online retail is just one of the many industries and verticals that can easily benefit from the Instant Clone capability.

To help further demonstrate the use case, a recorded demo was shown utilizing the new PowerCLI Extensions which provides access to the Instant Clone feature from an Automation standpoint. I actually built the demo for Alan and Li's session and I thought I would share some more details along with the video in case you were not able to attend the session in person, which I was not able to do.

Below are the set of technologies that were used in the demo:

I wanted to also give a quick shoutout to my buddy Rawlinson Rivera for his help with Intel and getting us access to their 64 Node NVMe VSAN Cluster. Our friends over at Intel were kind enough to allow us to quickly record a demo before they had to pack and ship the hardware to San Francisco for VMworld.

To provide some additional context on what you will see in the video, a diagram is provided below. The environment initially consists of two Photon VMs which runs the Consul Cluster which provides service discovery and configuration capabilities and the Nginx Load Balancer which is highlighted in the purple and blue box. Each of those VMs run their respective application which runs inside of a Docker Container and is highlighted in the smaller boxes. On each ESXi host, we have Photon VM which contains our Node.js application that we will be Instant Cloning from. This Photon VM is also referred to as the Parent VM and where all the new forked children VMs will be spawn off of.

This Photon VM also runs an instance of Consul, Registrator and the Node.js application inside of a Docker Container. As new instances are brought online which is highlighted in the black box, they will automatically register themselves with the Consul Cluster. As the Docker Containers are started up, Registrator will be notified to automatically add the new instances to the Nginx Load Balancer, making our application servers available for use immediately. When our application server powers down, Registrator will automatically detect that the Docker Container for our Node.js application is no longer running and automatically unregister it from the Nginx Load Balancer. To simply scale up or down the application, it is simply Instant Cloning our Photon (Parent) VM and powering it on or off, there are no additional steps required.

Without further ado, here is the video of the demo. If you want additional commentary and you attended VMworld US but could not make it to Alan and Li's session, you can now watch it online here. This session will also be repeated in VMworld EMEA for those attending in a couple of weeks. I would highly recommend you check out the session as there is a lot of awesomeness in the session along with technical deep dive of the Instant Clone technology.

VMworld 2015 Demo of how Wrecking Crew Inc. leverages vSphere's Instant Clone feature from lamw on Vimeo.

For more details about Instant Clone, be sure to check out these resources below which includes a Instant Clone script repository for several GuestOSes, including Photon which was used in the demo:

Quickly getting started with VMware AppCatalyst & AppCatalyst Vagrant Plugin

06.24.2015 by William Lam // 5 Comments

At Dockercon this week, the Cloud-Native Apps team at VMware introduced two new Tech Previews: VMware AppCatalyst and Project Bonneville. In addition, I also found out today that Fabio Rapposelli who works over in the CNA team has also released a Vagrant Plugin for VMware Catalyst as well. Having spent a couple of days playing with AppCatalyst before it was released, I thought this would be a good opportunity to show how to quickly get started with AppCatalyst but also to try out the new Vagrant Plugin that had just been released.

Before jumping in, What exactly is VMware AppCatalyst? It is a slimmed down desktop Hypervisor based on VMware Fusion that has been optimized for Developers who want to be able to quickly spin up Virtual Machines to run Docker Containers. Included with AppCatalyst is also VMware Photon, an open-source lightweight Linux container host that is used to quickly instantiate new VMs that are ready for running and building Docker Containers. Instead of a traditional GUI like VMware Fusion, AppCatalyst's is consumed completely via a REST API or CLI, which is also ideal for integrating with other 3rd Party Automation tools like Vagrant. Best of all, both VMware AppCatalyst & AppCatalyst Vagrant Plugin is completely Free!

Requirements:

Mac OS X 10.9.4 or 10.10
VMware Fusion must not be running

Quick INFO:

The AppCatalyst configuration file is located in ~/.appcatalyst.conf (if you wish to change system defaults)
The CLI to AppCatalyst is located at /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst
The daemon for the AppCatalyst REST API is located at /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst-daemon
SSH keys to the Photon VM is located in /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/etc/appcatalyst_insecure_ssh_key
Additional AppCatalyst Documentation can be found here

Exploring Appcatalyst CLI:

Step 1 - Download and install VMware AppCatalyst from here

Step 2 - Once AppCatalyst has been installed, you can explore the CLI and view the list of operations by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst

Step 3 - To create our first VM using AppCatalyst, run the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vm create vGhetto1

Note: You will see that all VMs created by AppCatalyst will be stored in /Users/[USER]/Documents/AppCatalyst and you can change this by editing DEFAULT_VM_PATH in AppCatalyst configuration file

Step 4 - To power on our VM, run the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vmpower on vGhetto1

Note: If you run into problems powering on your VM, there is a good chance that you may still have a VM that is running in VMware Fusion (also check docker-machine in case you are using that to power off any VMs provisioned using that tool)

Step 5 - Once the VM is powered on, we will probably want to retrieve the IP Address which could take a few seconds to be displayed by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst guest getip vGhetto1

Step 6 - Once we have the IP Address of our VM, we can then SSH to it using the SSH keys included with AppCatalyst by running the following command:

ssh -i /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/etc/appcatalyst_insecure_ssh_key [email protected]

At this point, you have successfully deployed a VM based on VMware Photon image using the AppCatalyst's CLI. You can now login and start running and building Docker Containers as Docker is already pre-installed on Photon. Next we will take look at using the AppCatalyst API.

Exploring Appcatalyst API:

UPDATE (01/22/16) - For the complete cheatsheet of using AppCatalyst API using cURL, check out this article here for more examples.

Step 1 - To use the AppCatalyst REST API, you will need to run the AppCatalyst Daemon by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst-daemon

Note: You can also run the AppCatalyst daemon in the background by adding '&' to the command

Step 2 - You can easily view the AppCatalyst API by opening a browser to http://localhost:8080 (assuming you did not change the port) which is built using Swagger. You can explore and even test the API using this interface if you have not worked with a Swagger interface before.

Step 3 - Lets quickly test the GET /vms operation which will list the VMs that are being managed by AppCatalyst. We will be using cURL by running the following command:

curl http://localhost:8080/api/vms

As long as the AppCatalyst daemon is running, you will be able to interact with the REST API using a variety of methods including the examples I have shown above.

Note: A known issue is that VMs powered on using the AppCatalyst API can not be managed by the CLI until they have been powered down using the API. Hopefully this issue will be resolved in a future update.

Exploring Appcatalyst Vagrant Plugin:

Step 1 - Ensure you have Vagrant already installed on your system, if not you can download it here.

Step 2 - Install the Vagrant Plugin by running the following command:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vmware-appcatalyst

Step 3 - You can either run "vagrant init" or manually create a file name Vagrant file that contains the following:

# Set our default provider for this Vagrantfile to 'vmware_appcatalyst'
ENV['VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER'] = 'vmware_appcatalyst'

nodes = [
  { hostname: 'gantry-test-1', box: 'vmware/photon' },
  { hostname: 'gantry-test-2', box: 'vmware/photon' }
]

Vagrant.configure('2') do |config|

  # Configure our boxes with 1 CPU and 384MB of RAM
  config.vm.provider 'vmware_appcatalyst' do |v|
    v.vmx['numvcpus'] = '1'
    v.vmx['memsize'] = '384'
  end

  # Go through nodes and configure each of them.j
  nodes.each do |node|
    config.vm.define node[:hostname] do |node_config|
      node_config.vm.box = node[:box]
      node_config.vm.hostname = node[:hostname]
    end
  end
end

The above Vagrant file will create two VMs called gantry-test-{1,2} using the VMware Photon Box hosted on Atlas by HashiCorp.

Step 4 (Optional) - If you decide to use the example above with VMware Photon Box, you will need to install an additional Vagrant Plugin for managing Photon Guest by running the following command:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-guests-photon

Step 5 - Ensure that the AppCatalyst daemon is running before proceeding with the next step as the Vagrant Plugin uses the AppCatalyst REST API.

Step 6 - To start the deployment, run the following command:

vagrant up --provider=vmware_appcatalyst

Step 7 - To login to one of the VMs that have been created by Vagrant, simply run the following command and specify the name of the VM to SSH to:

vagrant ssh gantry-test-1

Step 8 - Finally, we can also confirm that the VMs created by the AppCatalyst Vagrant Plugin is also visible using just the AppCatalyst REST API and we can perform another "GET" operation to verify the two VMs that we had just created.

Hopefully this quick primer has been useful in getting you introduced and started with VMware AppCatalyst as well as the new AppCatalyst Vagrant Plugin. If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to leave a comment in the VMware AppCatalyst Forum and for feedback/questions on AppCatalyst Vagrant Plugin, you can file issues here.