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Flexible OVF deployments using Deployment Options (e.g. small, medium, large)

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It is pretty common these days to see a vendor distribute their applications as a virtual appliance which pre-bundles both an operating system and their application instead of a stand alone installer and provides that as an OVF/OVA download. This makes it extremely easy for customers to deploy a vendors application with very minimal effort.

One potential challenge with providing a virtual appliance is that the virtual hardware configuration such as CPU and Memory is pre-configured during deployment and usually optimized for the lowest common denominator such as a small environment or even home lab for that matter. Of course, it is trivial to increase these resources after deployment but would it not be nice if the vendor could provide a "sizing recommendation" option during the deployment of their virtual appliance?

It turns out the OVF format actually supports such a functionality called Deployment Options and this is probably something that is not very well known. I personally have only seen this feature get used in one of VMware's virtual appliances which is vCenter Operations. When going through the deployment wizard of vCenter Operations appliance, you will notice one of the steps is to select your deployment configuration which in this case is based on the number of virtual machines you have in your vCenter Server environment.

The deployment option in this example translates to the number of vCPU and vMemory that the virtual appliances will be deployed with. Of course this information can also be used within the guestOS as part of the initial boot to configure the application based on the resources allocated to the virtual appliance. If you are interested in learning more about Deployment Options and its capabilities, you can find more details on the DMFT website for the OVF standards document starting on page 35.

I recently became interested in this as there was an internal thread asking how to leverage this feature and I initially thought this would be a capability provided by VMware Studio which is a product that helps you build virtual appliances. After deploying VMware Studio, I was unable to find a way to enable this feature as part of the build. Currently it looks like you would need to manually edit the OVF file which is XML based (not ideal) to add in this extra capability. You can also take an existing virtual machine and export using the vSphere Web/C# Client to an OVF/OVA and then add in the Deployment Option as a quick and dirty way of leveraging this feature within your organization.

I took a look at vCenter Operations OVA file to see how Deployment Options work and it actually looks pretty straight forward and requires the following three sections:

  1. Deployment Option Definitions
  2. Virtual Hardware Configurations
  3. Deployment Option Text

I have also provided a sample OVF called MyApp.ovf that you can download to see how these options work.

Deployment Option Definitions

The first section describes your Deployment Options, in the example below we use the words small, medium and large. You can change this text to be anything such as bronze, silver and gold. The only thing to note is the id and msgid which will need to be maped to section #2 and #3

<DeploymentOptionSection>   
 <Info>The list of deployment options</Info>   
  <Configuration ovf:id="small">     
      <Label ovf:msgid="config.small.label"/>     
      <Description ovf:msgid="config.small.description"/>   
  </Configuration>   
  <Configuration ovf:id="medium">     
      <Label ovf:msgid="config.medium.label"/>     
      <Description ovf:msgid="config.medium.description"/>   
  </Configuration>   
  <Configuration ovf:id="large">     
      <Label ovf:msgid="config.large.label"/>     
      <Description ovf:msgid="config.large.description"/>   
  </Configuration>  
</DeploymentOptionSection>

Virtual Hardware Configurations

The second section describes the virtual hardware configuration and uses a configuration parameter id that maps back to the original definition. In the example here, we are looking at the number of vCPU's the virtual appliance can be assigned with. For the initial default, you do not need to specify an entry, but for the others you will need to. Here I have a definition for medium and large and their respective vCPU configuration.

<Item>
  <rasd:AllocationUnits>hertz * 10^6</rasd:AllocationUnits>
  <rasd:Description>Number of Virtual CPUs</rasd:Description>
  <rasd:ElementName>1 virtual CPU(s)</rasd:ElementName>
  <rasd:InstanceID>1</rasd:InstanceID>
  <rasd:ResourceType>3</rasd:ResourceType>
  <rasd:VirtualQuantity>1</rasd:VirtualQuantity>
</Item>
<Item ovf:configuration="medium">
  <rasd:AllocationUnits>hertz * 10^6</rasd:AllocationUnits>
  <rasd:Description>Number of Virtual CPUs</rasd:Description>
  <rasd:ElementName>2 virtual CPU(s)</rasd:ElementName>
  <rasd:InstanceID>1</rasd:InstanceID>
  <rasd:ResourceType>3</rasd:ResourceType>
  <rasd:VirtualQuantity>2</rasd:VirtualQuantity>
</Item>
<Item ovf:configuration="large">
  <rasd:AllocationUnits>hertz * 10^6</rasd:AllocationUnits>
  <rasd:Description>Number of Virtual CPUs</rasd:Description>
  <rasd:ElementName>4 virtual CPU(s)</rasd:ElementName>
  <rasd:InstanceID>1</rasd:InstanceID>
  <rasd:ResourceType>3</rasd:ResourceType>
  <rasd:VirtualQuantity>4</rasd:VirtualQuantity>
</Item>

Deployment Option Text

The final section contains the actual text you wish to display for each of your Deployment Configurations. You will see the msgid maps back to your definitions, so if you choose to change the wording, make sure these match up.

<Strings>
 <Msg ovf:msgid="config.small.label">Small</Msg>  
 <Msg ovf:msgid="config.small.description">Use this configuration for small deployments. This deployment will need 1 vCPUs and 1024 Memory for the vApp.</Msg>  
 <Msg ovf:msgid="config.medium.label">Medium</Msg>  
 <Msg ovf:msgid="config.medium.description">Use this configuration for small deployments. This deployment will need 2 vCPUs and 2048 Memory for the vApp.</Msg>  
 <Msg ovf:msgid="config.large.label">Large</Msg>
 <Msg ovf:msgid="config.large.description">Use this configuration for small deployments. This deployment will need 4 vCPUs and 4096 Memory for the vApp.</Msg>
</Strings>

Though I have experienced Deployment Options while deploying vCenter Operations in the past, thinking about it more now, it is definitely something that can be useful for folks building virtual appliances. The really nice thing about this feature is it works when deploying to both a vCenter Server as well as a standalone ESXi host.  Hopefully we will see more virtual appliances leveraging this neat feature of the OVF standard.

Quick Tip - Automate the export of a vCenter Orchestrator workflow using the CLI

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Steve Jin recently wrote an article about vCenter Orchestrator REST APIs: Executing Workflow which reminded me of an interesting issue that I had faced several months back. I had just finished developing a custom workflow on a beta version of vCenter Orchestrator and of course one of the challenges with using early software is that it could be unstable. I was unable login to the vCO interface via vSphere Web Client or the vCO Client to export my workflow through the regular UI interface. I tried everything and I thought I might have lost my workflow!

I reached out to one of the vCO engineers and asked if there was an easy way to recover my workflow and it turns out there was a very simple method IF the vCO REST API endpoint is still accessible, which it was. To test this, you can either use cURL on the command-line or your favorite REST Client for your browser and perform a GET operation on the following URL (replace the URL with the URL of your vCO Server):

https://vco.primp-industries.com:8281/api/workflows

Note: The vCO REST API is only available starting with vSphere 5.1

If the command was successful, you should see a list of all the workflows in your vCO Server:

I am not aware of any filtering that can be done to narrow down the specific vCO Workflow, but if you are using a browser-based REST Client, you can just search for the name of your workflow. In the above example, I am interested in the "Change Guest OS Type" workflow and you can see its corresponding vCO Workflow ID which is highlighted.

To export and save the vCO Workflow to your local system, you just need to perform a GET operation on the vCO Workflow URL and specify "Accept:application/zip" for the request header which will allow you to save the vCO workflow.

Here is an example using cURL to export the  vCO Workflow and save to a file called ChangeGuestOS.workflow:

curl -i -k -u vcoadmin -H "Accept:application/zip" -X GET https://vco.primp-industries.com:8281/api/workflows/7D808080808080808080808080808080BC818080013141141566711a974a8fef8 -o ChangeGuestOS.workflow

Automate Enabling VM Storage Profiles Capability in vSphere

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I recently had to rebuild one of my lab environments that consisted of a vCenter Server and several ESXi hosts and one of the capabilities I required was VM Storage Profiles. In a brand new vSphere environment, VM Storage Profiles is disabled by default, presumably due to licensing as this feature is not available in every SKU. To enable VM Storage Profiles, you will need to connect to your vCenter Server using either the vSphere Web Client or the legacy vSphere C# Client as seen in the screenshot below.

Another way of enabling the VM Storage Profiles feature is through an automated fashion using the vSphere APIs where this functionality is exposed.

Note: To manage and consume VM Storage Profiles, you will still need to use the vSphere Web Client or vSphere C# Client as the APIs for this functionality is not yet available.

VM Storage Profiles is enabled on a per vSphere Cluster basis and there is a boolean property called spbmEnabled which determines whether this feature is enabled or disabled. To update this property, you will need to use the ReconfigureComputeResource_Task method.

Here is are two examples of implementing the API both in a PowerCLI script as well as a vSphere SDK for Perl script:

PowerCLI:

In my lab environment, I have a vSphere Cluster called "Cluster" and you can use PowerCLI to check whether VM Storage Profiles is enabled or not by running this command (replace Cluster with the name of your vSphere Cluster):

(Get-Cluster -Name Cluster).extensionData.ConfigurationEx.SpbmEnabled

To enable VM Storage Profiles, you can then call the Enable-StorageProfile function along with the name of the vSphere Cluster which is just called "Cluster":

 

vSphere SDK for Perl:

To enable VM Storage Profiles using the vSphere SDK for Perl, I wrote a quick script called storageProfileMgmt.pl which allows you to query whether a vSphere Cluster has VM Storage Profiles as well as enabling and disabling the feature. Here is a screenshot demonstrating how the script works: