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How to automatically add ESX(i) host to vCenter in Kickstart

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While recently updating my Automating Active Directory Domain Join in ESX(i) Kickstart article, it reminded me an old blog post by Justin Guidroz who initially identified a way to add an ESXi host to vCenter using python and the vSphere MOB. The approach was very neat but was not 100% automated as it required some user interaction with the vSphere MOB to identify certain API properties before one could potentially script it within a kickstart installation.

I decided to revisit this problem as it was something I had investigated awhile back. There are numerous ways on getting something like this to work in your environment, but it all boils down to your constraints, naming convention and provisioning process. If you have a well defined environment and utilizing a good naming structure and can easily identify which vCenter a given ESX(i) host should be managed from, then this can easily be integrated into your existing kickstart with minor tweaks. This script was tested on vCenter 4.1 Update 1 and ESXi 4.1 and 4.1 Update1.

UPDATE (09/08/2025) - Please see this blog post for an updated solution to this use case

UPDATE (02/01/2013) - I have provided a download link to the joinvCenter.py script below as there have been some funky formatting issues when displaying the script. For ESXi 5.x hosts, you will need to ensure httpClient is enabled (disabled by default) on the ESXi firewall else it will not be able to connect to your vCenter Server. Please refer below for the instructions.

UPDATE (03/29/2011) - Updated the IP Address extraction to use gethostbyname and added proper logout logic after joining vCenter.

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Automating Active Directory User Management in ESXi Kickstart

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In the previous post we looked at Automating Active Directory Domain Join in ESXi Kickstart. We are now going to look at adding domain users without having to manually go through vSphere Client or external scripts after an ESXi host has been provisioned. We are going to be leveraging vim-cmd to accomplish this during the kickstart installation. Before doing so, you will need to know the the available roles on a default ESXi host and the syntax for a given permission.

To see the available roles, you can run the following command on an already provisioned ESXi host:

vim-cmd vimsvc/auth/roles | less

The default roles on an ESXi host are:

  • NoAccess
  • ReadOnly
  • Admin

To see the existing permissions, you can run the following command on an already provisioned ESXi host:

vim-cmd vimsvc/auth/permissions

These entries will match what you see in the vSphere Client and dictate who has login access to the ESXi host.

To add a new permission, we will be using the "vim-cmd vimsvc/auth/entity_permission_add" and it requires five parameters.

  • First - Entity (This can be found by looking at the output from permissions)
  • Second - Username
  • Third - Boolean on whether this is a group or not (should be false)
  • Fourth - The role to be applied to the user
  • Fifth - Boolean on whether to propagate this permission

If you manually add a domain user, you can easily verify the user can login by running the "id" command which will perform a look up on the user. If it is successful, it should return an entry corresponding to something like this:

Note: We need to use the double slash "\" to escape the initial slash when running the query. Also make note of the domain name as it may or may not match your full domain name.

We are now ready to craft a simple script that will add domain users as part of the ESXi kickstart process. The following snippet should be placed in the %firstboot section of your kickstart and after your Active Directory domain join code. Make sure you replace the DOMAIN_NAME variable along with the usernames. In the example I have two separate for loops to handle ReadOnly and Admin users, you do not need both if you are only adding one type of users.

The script basically performs a simple 60sec sleep to ensure the domain join process has completed before continuing. If you do not place a sleep, the subsequent code will fail to execute. The next step is to validate the user by doing a simple lookup using "id" command and upon successful look up of the user, we add the appropriate permissions.

Note: We only have two add these two entities: "vim.Folder:ha-folder-root" and "vim.ComputeResource:ha-compute-res" to properly add a permission.

If everything was successful, after your ESXi installation you now should have your host joined to your Active Directory and a list of domain users who now have permission to login to the ESXi host. You can verify by using the vSphere Client and taking a look at the Permissions tab.

If you would like to create custom roles on your ESXi host, you can use the following command:

vim-cmd vimsvc/auth/role_add

Note: The syntax for the privileges parameter lists only five, but it actually accepts as many as you need with the custom role

Automating Active Directory Domain Join in ESX(i) Kickstart

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I recently received an email asking if it was possible to automate the joining of an ESXi 4.1 host to Active Directory within a kickstart installation. The simple answer is yes; you can easily do so using the same trick found in tip #7 in Automating ESXi 4.1 Kickstart Tips & Tricks post which connects locally to the vSphere MOB using python.

Having said that, there is a small caveat to this solution in which the credentials used to join the ESX(i) host must be exposed in clear-text, this may or may not be acceptable. A potential way of getting this to work is to create a dedicated windows service account with limited privileges to add only ESXi hosts to your domain.

The reason for the use of clear-text password is the vSphere API method that is used to join an ESX(i) host to AD domain, joinDomain(), only supports plain text.

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