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Leveraging vCD + vCO + Wavemaker Part 2

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Continuing from our previous post Leveraging vCD + vCO + Wavemaker Part 1, I am now going to show you how to integrate the vCenter Orchestrator workflow we created earlier into Wavemaker to present a simple web application to an end user. If you can not wait to go through all the steps, jump to the bottom for the video of the final product.

You will need to download Wavemaker 6.4.3 RC versus the 6.3.3 GA because there is a specific UI feature that I have utilized to provide a better user experience. You will need to register for a free account to download the development builds and I have been told 6.4.3 should GA pretty soon.

Once you have downloaded Wavemaker, you will need to install it on your system and you maybe asked to perform an additional library download, just follow the instructions and you ready to create your first Wavemaker application. After the installation, go ahead and start the Wavemaker application and it will automatically launch a web browser which will be your workspace. You will need to use either Firefox or Internet Explorer, as it does not work with Chrome.

In case you get lost below or would like to just get this working right away, I have exported my project and it can be downloaded it here. You can simply import the .zip file and make the necessary changes to the project to fit your environment.

Start off by creating a new project and give your project a name and just use the default theme and then click ok.

Next, at the top screen click on "Services" and then "Web Service" since vCO is exposed as a webService API which we will import into Wavemaker.

We need to specify the URL of your vCO server, it should be in the following format:

http://vco.primp-industries.com:8280/vmware-vmo-webcontrol/webservice?WSDL

and then provide a name for your service, in the example, I named it "vCOReference".

Once the vCO service has been imported, click on "Canvas" and then "Palette". We will now add widgets for our web application. Add the following in this order: Picture (if you wish), Text, Button and Grid. It should look something like the following:

Most of these should be pretty self explanatory widgets. The Grid (dataGrid) is used to display your data result.

If you decide you would like to add a logo/banner, click on the "Source" tab at the top and then click on "Resources". Here you will be able to add any additional resources to your project such as a images.

Once you have uploaded your image, select the picture widgets in your canvas and click on "source" icon to the right side of the screen. Here you can now bind to the image you just uploaded and click "Bind", there is also a green icon on the upper right hand corner to show you whether or not the binding is the proper type.

You should see the image being displayed in the picture widget.

Now click on the Text widget in your canvas and go ahead and provide a name for the variable and also a caption which is located on the right side of the screen. In the example, I named both fields "username", you can provide a different name but be sure to keep track of the variable name as it is used later on.

If you recall earlier, I mentioned I am using a specific UI widget that requires Wavemaker 6.4.3 RC, which is the LoadingDialog widget and allows us to display a busy dialog for various events. This is just one of the many features in 6.4.3 release. Go ahead and add this to the canvas and it is under "Dialogs". We will also configure the "widgetToCover" and specify "dojoGrid1" which is just the name of our dataGrid.

Next we will need to add several variables that will call the vCO services and store our results. To add these new variables, you will click on the "Insert" option at the very top. It is also helpful to be in the "Services" tab next to "Model" to see the variables that have been created in your navigation pane.

The first variable that we will add is called "varResult", this will be a regular variable that will be used to store our results. Make sure the following properties on the right side of the screen are set:

  • name = varResult
  • type = StringData
  • isList = checked

The second variable to be created will be a "Service Variable" and will named "getResult" which will retrieve the results from vCO using the getWorkflowTokenResult API method. Make sure the following properties on the right side of the screen are set:

name = getResult
servcice = vCOReference
operation = getWorkflowTokenResult

The third variable will be a "Timer" variable which is located under "Advanced" and will be named "resultTimer". This is needed as the results are not available immediately after executing the workflow and we set a 3sec timer to then retrieve our results.

Make sure the following properties on the right side of the screen are set:

  • name = resultTimer
  • delay = 3000 (in MS, you may need to tweak this based on your env)
  • repeating = unchecked

We will also need to specify the action to trigger when the timer fires, this is defined under "Events" for the resultTimer variable. Set the onTimerFire to "getResult" Service Variable that we defined earlier. When the timer goes off, it will retrieve the results of our workflow

The fourth and final variable that we will need to add is also a "Service Variable" which will execute the workflow by calling the executeWorkflow API in vCO. We will name it "runWF". Make sure the following properties on the right side of the screen are set:

  • name = runWF
  • service = vCOReference
  • operation = executeWorkflow

Now we need to bind our parameters which will be used to provide input to the various variables and/or vCO API methods.

The first one will be the "getResult" variable and you will need to expand down to "parameters" on the right side of the screen. Here you should see three parameters which will need to be populated: password, username and workflowTokenId.

Click on "username" and then a new window will pop-up. Select "Expression" and then select "username" and provide the username that will be used to connect to vCO and ensure there are double quotes around the string and click Apply when finished.

Click on "password" and do the same exact thing and provide the password that will be used to connect to vCO and click Apply when finished.

Click on "workflowId" and instead of selecting "Expression", select "Simple" and drill down into the "runWF" Service Variable and select "id". As part of the executeWorkflow return object, a WorkflowTokenType is returned and the "id" property is what is needed for us to retrieve the results of the workflow. Click "Bind" to finish the parameter binding for this service variable.

Note: There is a green box on the upper right hand of the screen which validates the property binding type, this can be helpful when binding parameters.

After you have finished binding those three parameters, you should now see the following:

Lastly for this service variable, we will also need to create an event trigger. Select "onResult" and click on "Javascript" which will allow us to insert some javascript logic upon the result of the data.

You will now be taken to the "Source" tab and a new javascript function will automatically be created for you called "getResultResult" assuming you have followed the naming standards in the example. You will need to add the following lines of javascript to the function:

The script clears any previous output on the dataGrid and then retrieves the data which is returned as a single string and replaces all the characters we do not want. It then splits using the ";" as the delimiter and adds each entry to our dataGrid.

Once you have pasted the javascript, go ahead and click back on the "Cavnas" tab. In addition to the first even trigger, we will also set "onSuccess" to loadingDialog1.hide which will hide the busy dialog after the results are available to be displayed on the dataGrid.

Now we need to configure the event triggers for "runWF" service variable. The first is "onBeforeUpdate" and we will set that to loadingDialog1.show which will display the busy dialog while the workflow is being executing. The second will be "onResult" and that will be configured to call the "resultTimer" timer variable and retrieve our results after the workflow has been executed.

Next we will need to configure the "submit" button event and we will again create a custom javascript which will call our "runWF" service variable.

Note: This technically could have been easier to bind to the parameters of the "runWF" service variable, but I found a bug that prevented this from working. A work around was provided by Michael Kantor, a Wavemaker developer and the bug has been reported and hopefully will be fixed before the GA version of 6.4.3 is released.

You will need to add the following lines of javascript to the function:

Here you will need to substitute the username/password to your vCO server and the workflowId which can be obtained by following this blog post. The workflowInputs requires the name of the workflow input variable name and assuming you followed the previous article, you can keep the same name and "this.username.getDataValue()" will extract the string from the username text widget you added. If you changed the name of the variable, you will need to update this accordingly.

Okay, we are almost there. The last widget we need to add an event trigger to is the dataGrid and for "onClick" we will also create a new javascript.

You will need to add the following lines of javascript to the function:

This single line of javascript will open a new window when a user clicks on one of the dataGrid cells.

Now lastly, we just need to bind our dataGrid to our "varResult" variable that contains the results. Select the dataGrid widget and click on "dataSet" and bind to "varResult" and ensure you see a green icon on the upper right hand side of the window.

You can also name the column header, by default it is called "DataValue" and you can change it to "orgUrls" if you like. To do so, right click on the dataGrid and select "editColumns".

We are all done now! We just need to compile the application by click on the "Run" icon at the very top. After the application compiles, it will open a new window to your new Wavemaker application.

Here is a quick video demonstration of the application using:

Leveraging vCD + vCO + Wavemaker Part 2 from lamw on Vimeo.

So there you have it, creating your own custom web portal application using Wavemaker, vCenter Orchestrator and vCloud Director vCO Plugin! As you can see the possibilities are endless and with a little javascript knowledge, you can create any type of portal that goes beyond just VMware products!

I would like to give a big thanks to Christian Johannsen, Michael Kantor and especially Craig Conover in assisting me with creating my first Wavemaker application. These guys are truly rock stars with vCO and/or Wavemaker! For more information about Wavmeker, definitely check out documentation/examples and the Wavemaker community forums.

In addition, there are some other great examples of utilizing Wavemaker written by my colleagues:

The Missing Piece In Creating Your Own Ghetto vSEL Cloud

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Awhile back I discovered an undocumented flag called "esxvm" in the SQL statements of the new vCloud Director 1.5 installer that suggested the possibility of deploying nested ESXi hosts in vCD. However, after further investigation the flag only enables the automated deployment of an ESXi 5 parameter (vhv.allow) which is required to run nested ESXi 4.x/5.x hosts as part of preparing a new ESXi 5 hosts in vCloud Director. There was still a missing piece to the puzzle to enable this functionality within vCloud Director user interface.

The answer eventually came from attending a recent session at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas CIM1436 - Virtual SE Lab (vSEL) Building the VMware Hybrid Cloud by Ford Donald of VMware. I will not go into detail about what vSEL is, if you would like more information take a look at this blog post The Demo Cloud at VMworld Copenhagen or check out Ford's VMworld presentation online. In one of Ford's slides, he describes the necessary steps to enable nested ESXi called ESX_VM mode in vCloud Director which actually consists of two parts:

  • Enable nested virtualization and 64-bit vVM support in vSphere 5
  • Enable special mode in vCloud Director called ESX_VM to allow for vSphere 4 and 5 hosts as valid guestOS types

There are also some additional steps that are required after enabling ESX_VM mode:

  • Preparing or re-preparing ESXi 5 hosts
  • Allowing for Promiscuous Mode in vCD-NI or VLAN-backed Network Pool

********************* DISCLAIMER *********************
This is not a supported configuration by VMware and this can disappear at any time, use at your own risk 

********************* DISCLAIMER *********************

Note: I will assume the reader has a good understanding of how to install/configure vCloud Director and how it works. I will not be going into any details in configuring or installing vCD, you can find plenty of resources on the web including here, here, here and here. I will also assume you understand how to configure vCD-NI and VLAN-backed network pools in vCloud Director and how they work.

The first part is to enable nested virtualization (nested ESXi) support within the ESXi 5 hosts when they're being prepared by vCloud Director by updating the following SQL statement as noted in my earlier blog post Cool Undocumented Features in vCloud Director 1.5:

UPDATE config SET value='true' WHERE name='extension.esxvm.enabled';

The second part is to update the vCloud Director database to add support for both vSphere 4 and 5 hosts as valid guestOS types:

INSERT INTO guest_osfamily (family,family_id) VALUES ('VMware ESX/ESXi',6);

INSERT INTO guest_os_type (guestos_id,display_name, internal_name, family_id, is_supported, is_64bit, min_disk_gb, min_memory_mb, min_hw_version, supports_cpu_hotadd, supports_mem_hotadd, diskadapter_id, max_cpu_supported, is_personalization_enabled, is_personalization_auto, is_sysprep_supported, is_sysprep_os_packaged, cim_id, cim_version) VALUES (seq_config.NextVal,'ESXi 4.x', 'vmkernelGuest', 6, 1, 1, 8, 3072, 7,1, 1, 4, 8, 0, 0, 0, 0, 107, 40);

INSERT INTO guest_os_type (guestos_id,display_name, internal_name, family_id, is_supported, is_64bit, min_disk_gb, min_memory_mb, min_hw_version, supports_cpu_hotadd, supports_mem_hotadd, diskadapter_id, max_cpu_supported, is_personalization_enabled, is_personalization_auto, is_sysprep_supported, is_sysprep_os_packaged, cim_id, cim_version) VALUES (seq_config.NextVal, 'ESXi 5.x', 'vmkernel5Guest', 6, 1, 1, 8, 3072, 7,1, 1, 4, 8, 0, 0, 0, 0, 107, 50);

To apply these SQL statements to your vCloud Director 1.5 database, you will need to login to either to your Oracle or SQL Server database and manually execute these statements using the account that you originally created.

Here is an example of executing the SQL statements on an Oracle Express 11g database (Oracle Express is not officially supported by VMware):

As you can see, we need we first create a new guest_osfamily type called "VMware ESX/ESXi" and we need to also provide a unique family_id, which from a default installation of vCloud Director 1.5, the next available value will be 6. Next, we need to create the two new guestos_type "ESXi 4.x" and "ESXi 5.x" and again we need to provide a unique guestos_id which from a default installation of vCloud Director 1.5, the next available values will be 81 and 82. If any errors are thrown regarding a constraint being violated, then the ids may already have been used, you can always query to see what the next value is or select a new id.

Once you have executed the SQL statements, you will need to restart the vCloud Director Cell for the changes to take effect and if you already have prepared ESXi 5 hosts, you will need to re-prepare the hosts.

If you prefer not to manually do this, you can take a look at my blog post Automating vCloud Director 1.5 & Oracle DB Installation which has been updated to allow you to enable ESX_VM mode with your vCloud Director 1.5 installation. There is a new flag in the vcd.rsp file called ENABLE_NESTED_ESX which can be toggled to true/false which will automatically perform the SQL statements as part of the post-installation of vCloud Director 1.5 and restart the vCD Cell for you.

Here is a screenshot if you decide to enable this flag:

Finally, the last configuration tweak is to enable both promiscuous mode and forged transmit in either your vCD-NI or VLAN-backed Network Pool which is a requirement to run nested ESXi hosts. You locate the name of your network pool to identify distributed portgroup.

Next you can either use the vCD API or login to your vCenter Server and enable the promiscuous mode for that specific distributed portgroup.

UPDATE: Thanks to @DasNing - You can also enable promiscuous mode by executing the following SQL query: UPDATE network_pool SET promiscuous_mode='1' WHERE name=';

We are finally done with all the configurations!

If you successfully completed the above, when you go and create a new virtual machine in vCloud Director, you should now have a new Operation System Family called "VMware ESX/ESXi"

Within this new OS family, you can now provision a new ESXi 4.x or ESXi 5.x guestOS

Here is an example of my own vGhettoPod which includes vMA5 and vESXi 5 host which I can use to perform various types of testing in my home lab.

Now you can create your own ghetto vSEL cloud using VMware vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5 and vShield 5!

How to Decrease iSCSI Login Timeout on ESXi 5?

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VMware recently identified an issue where the iSCSI boot process may take longer than expected on ESXi 5. This can occur when the iSCSI targets are unavailable while the ESXi host is booting up and the additional retry code that was added in ESXi 5 can cause a delay in the host startup. It has been noted that the number of retry iteration has been hard coded in the iSCSI stack to nine and this can not be modified.

UPDATE1: VMware just released the patch for iSCSI delay in ESXi 5 Express Patch 01 - kb.vmware.com/kb/2007108

Here is what you would see in /var/log/syslog.log after ESXi host boots up:

Being the curious person that I am, I decided to see if this hard coded value can actually be modified or tweaked. I believe I have found a way to decrease the delay significantly but this has only been tested in a limited lab environment. If you are potentially impacted by this iSCSI boot delay and would like to test this unsupported configuration change, I would be interested to see if this fact reduces the timing.

*** DISCLAIMER ***

This is not supported by VMware, please test this in a staging/development environment before pushing it out to any critical system
*** DISCLAIMER ***

My initial thought was check out the iscsid.conf configuration file, but noticed that VMware does not make use of this default configuration file (not automatically backed up by ESXi), instead it uses a small sqlite database file located in /etc/vmwre/vmkiscsid/vmkiscsid.db.

Since the vmkiscsid.db is actively backed up ESXi, any changes would persist through system reboot and does not require any special tricks.

UPDATE: Thanks to Andy Banta's comment below, you can view the iSCSI sqlite database by using an unsupported --dump-db and -x flag in vmkiscsid.

To dump the entire database, you can use the following command:

vmkiscsid --dump-db

To execute a specific SQL query such as viewing a particular database table, you can use the following command:

vmkiscsid -x "select * from discovery"

Again, this is an unsupported flag by VMware, use at your own risk but it does save you from copying the iSCSI database to another host for edits.

To view the contents of the sqlite file, I scp'ed the file off to a remote host that has sqlite3 client such as the VMware vMA appliance. After a bit of digging with some trial and error, I found the parameter  discovery.ltime in the discovery table would alter the time it takes for the iSCSI boot up process to complete when the iSCSI targets are unavailable during boot up. Before you make any changes, make a backup of your vmkiscsid.db file in case you need the original file.

To view the sqlite file, use the following command:

sqlite3 vmkiscsid.db
.mode line *
select * from discovery;

The default value is 27 and what I have found is that as long as it is not this particular value, the retry loop is not executed or it exits almost immediately after retrying for only a few seconds.

To change the value, I used the following SQL command:

update discovery set 'discovery.ltime'=1; 

To verify the value, you can use the following SQL command:

.mode line *
select * from discovery;

Once you have confirmed the change, you will need to type .quit to exit and then upload the modified vmkiscsid.db file to our ESXi 5 host.

Next to ensure the changes are saved immediately to the backup bootbank, run the /sbin/auto-backup.sh which will force an ESXi backup.

At this point, to test you can disconnect your iSCSI target from the network and reboot your ESXi 5 host, it should hopefully decrease the amount of time it takes to go through the iSCSI boot process.

As you can see from this screenshot of the ESXi syslog.log, it took only 15 seconds to retry and the continue through the boot up process.

In my test environment, I setup a vESXi host with software iSCSI initiator which binded to three VMkernel interfaces and connected to ten iSCSI targets on a Nexenta VSA. I disconnected the network adapter on iSCSI target and modified the discovery.ltime on ESXi host and checked out the logs to see how long it took to get pass the retry code.

Here is a table of the results:

discovery.ltime iSCSI Bootup Delay
1 15sec
3 15sec
6 15sec
12 15sec
24 15sec
26 15sec
27 7min
28 15sec
81 15sec

As you can see, only the value of 27 causes the extremely long delay (7 minutes in my environment) and all other values all behave pretty much the same (15secs roughly). VMware did mention hard coding the number of iterations to 9 and when you divide 27 into 9 you get 3. I tried using values that were multiple of three and I was not able to find any correlation to the delay other than it not taking as long as using the value 27. I also initially tested with 5 iSCSI targets and doubled it to 10 but it did not seem to be a factor in the overall delay.

I did experiment with other configuration parameters such as node.session.initial_login_retry_max, but it did not change the amount of time or iterations of the iSCSI retry code. Ultimately, I believe due to the hard coding of the retry iterations, by modifying discovery.ltime it bypasses the retry code or reduces the amount of retry all together. I am not an iscsid expert, so there is a possibility that other parameter changes could decrease the amount of wait time.

UPDATE: Please take a look at Andy Banta's comment below regarding the significance of the value 27 and the official definitions of the discovery.ltime and node.session.initial_login_retry_max parameters. Even though the behavior from my testing seems to reduce the iSCSI boot delay, there is an official fix coming from VMware.

UPDATE1: VMware just released the patch for iSCSI delay in ESXi 5 Express Patch 01 - kb.vmware.com/kb/2007108

I would be interested to see if this hack holds true for environments with multiple network portals or great number of iSCSI targets. If you are interested or would like to test this theory, please leave a comment regarding your environment.