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Quick Tip - Adding a custom prefix to your VCSIM environment

03.16.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I just discovered this neat little feature of VCSIM (vCenter Server Simulator) which allows you to append a global string prefix to all vSphere objects in your inventory. I am not sure if this capability has always been there but definitely can be useful if you plan on running multiple VCSIM environments, this can be an easy way to uniquely identify a particular configuration.

To add the custom prefix, you will need to add the <prefix></prefix> tags to your VCSIM inventory configuration file. You can take a look at the default template /etc/vmware-vpx/vcsim/model/initInventory.cfg to get an idea of the available configurations.

Here is a the sample VCSIM configuration file for the inventory in the screenshot above:

<config>
  <inventory>
    <dc>1</dc>
    <host-per-dc>0</host-per-dc>
    <vm-per-host>0</vm-per-host>
    <poweron-vm-per-host>0</poweron-vm-per-host>
    <cluster-per-dc>1</cluster-per-dc>
    <host-per-cluster>2</host-per-cluster>
    <rp-per-cluster>1</rp-per-cluster>
    <vm-per-rp>3</vm-per-rp>
    <poweron-vm-per-rp>3</poweron-vm-per-rp>
    <dv-portgroups>0</dv-portgroups>
  </inventory>
  <prefix>vGhetto-</prefix>
  <worker-threads>1</worker-threads>
  <synchronous>true</synchronous>
</config>

Automating Horizon View deployments using VCT & cURL

03.11.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Last week I spent a couple of days playing around with the new Horizon View Configuration Tool (VCT) Fling and as part of my "exploration" of VCT, I needed to re-run the deployment. Going through the guided wizard the first time was fine, but if you needed to do that 5-10 times, then it was not very fun. Since VCT was a simple web application, I decided to fire up one of my favorite tool, Firebug to do some poking around.

It turns out the payload request was actually very simple and it contains all the variables for each of the parameters that a user would specify through the UI and a single HTTP POST request is then sent to the web application for deployment. I took all the variables and created a simple shell script that a user can easily edit without having to worry about fat-fingering on the UI as there is no form validation at the moment and then send the POST request using my other favorite tool cURL.

Disclaimer: These scripts are provided for informational and educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

You can download the script here called automateVCT.sh

Before running the script, you will need to edit the variables for your environment and if you have an existing Active Directory server, then there are some variables that you can leave off. Towards the bottom of the script, there is an infinite loop that will run to continuously to check the current status which is then printed on the screen every 10 seconds. For practical use, you will probably want to change the timing to something a bit longer like every 5 minutes for a status.

Here is an example of executing the script:

As you can see from the screenshot, once the request has been accepted by VCT, the status will be printed on the screen which is the same status shown in the UI. If everything was successful, you should eventually see the status display the IP Address of your Horizon View environment like the following:

This script really came in handy for testing VCT and I thought it would be great to share it with the community so you can automate the deployment of your Horizon View environment using VCT!

virtuallyGhetto gets a bit less ghetto ...

03.03.2014 by William Lam // 9 Comments

Please do not be alarmed with the new look, I promise the content will continue to stay technical and ghetto still 🙂

As some of you may have noticed, I finally took the plunge last Friday and migrated off of Google's Blogger platform and onto WordPress. I have actually been looking at an alternative platform for a couple of years now but never got beyond the research phase as it seemed like a daunting task. I decided to finally make the switch in 2014 and with the help from fellow blogger Ben Thomas, I was able to finally transition to WordPress after two weeks of tinkering around and testing. Do not get me wrong, Blogger is a great platform for anyone looking to quickly get started with blogging and it is very easy to use and best of all, it is free. When I first started virtuallyGhetto back in May of 2010 (wow, almost 4ys ago!), I chose Blogger for two simple reasons, it was easy to use and most importantly I could use a custom domain without paying additional fees.

At the time I really had no idea if this blogging thing would actually take off and whether people would care about the things that interests me. It took me almost another two years to decide if I wanted to start blogging and I really owe it to guys like Duncan Epping and Scott Lowe who convinced me to give this blogging thing a go. Over the years, Blogger has not changed too much and the platform had very small incremental enhancements here and there. I felt that it was really starting to fall behind other blogging platforms and was lacking in several areas, one of which was plugin extensions, which was much richer on other platforms. Another thing that really surprised me was how often the "search" functionality broke on my site; I am not sure how many readers actually noticed this. For a company that is the de-facto standard when it comes to search, I was quite shocked to see this happen on somewhat a frequent basis. It was usually faster and more efficient to search for something on Google than it was to search directly on my blog.

The lack of plugins and enhancements to the platform is what really motivated me to take a look at an alternative solution. Although WordPress was at the top of my list, I also took a look at some of the newer blogging platforms like Medium and Ghost. I decided to go with WordPress as it still has the largest community and these newer platforms were specifically aimed at users who just want to write. Their interfaces were very simplistic which is great for people who just want to write and not get bogged down by too many options but they were still too lacking from a plugin extension point of view that most bloggers expect today.

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