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Configuring vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) To Manage An Alternate vCenter Server

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When deploying vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN), it is automatically associated with the vCenter Server from which it was deployed from and this behavior is by design. This means if you have two vCenter Servers, you will need to deploy two separate VIN instances, one for each vCenter Server as shown in the diagram below.

For scenarios where you have a separate management and compute cluster, each with their own vCenter Server, it can pose a problem if you want to run all your "infrastructure" virtual machines in the management cluster and not in the compute cluster. This very topic was recently brought up in an internal discussion and after explaining how VIN works, I safely assumed this behavior could not be modified. It turns out the discussion peaked the interest of one of the VIN developers and a suggestion was made on how one could potentially change this behavior. This un-tested (NotSupported) "workaround" would allow a user to deploy a single VIN instance under the management cluster and allow it to associate with another vCenter Server and its workloads. Below is a diagram on what this would look like.

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How To Pronounce Some Of VMware's Acronyms

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VMware's announcement last week on the new vCloud Hybrid Services offering generated quite a bit of buzz and excitement. One thing that I had noticed on Twitter during the announcement as well as the days following was discussions around the pronunciation of the vCloud Hybrid Services acronym (vCHS). There were couple of "ways" that folks have heard it pronounced and I thought I write this fun little post and share what the "official" ways of pronouncing some of these acronyms are (at least from my understanding working at VMware)

Disclaimer: I have no comments on us putting little v's on everything 😉

Below are the top VMware products/features that I have heard multiple acronyms for and the controversial on how to properly pronounce each of them. I have also provided a link to Google translate which provides a nice text-to-speech (lower right bottom) so you can listen to each of the official pronunciation. If there are other pronunciations that you have heard or any corrections, feel free to leave a comment.

Product Official Other
vSphere OpenStack Virtual Appliance (VOVA) vo-va (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vo-va) N/A
VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) v-san (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-san) N/A
vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) v-f-r-c (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-f-r-c) N/A
vCloud Air (vCA) v-c-a (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-a) N/A
vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) v-chess (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-chess) v-cheese v-c-h-s
vRealize Air Compliance (vRAC) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations Insight (vRI) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations (vROPs) vee-rops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vee-rops) N/A
vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops) v-c-ops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-ops) v-cops
vRealize Automation (vR / vRAuto) v-ra (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-ra) vr-auto (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vr-auto) N/A
vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) v-cake (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-cake) v-c-a-c v-cac
vRealize Business (vRBus) N/A N/A
vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) N/A N/A
vCenter Log Insight (vC Log) v-c-log (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-log) Log Insight
vRealize Code Stream (vRCS) N/A N/A
vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) N/A N/A
vRealize Hyperic (vRH) N/A N/A
vRealize Application Services (vRAS) N/A N/A

Patching VMware Virtual Appliances Using vamicli

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Last week I wrote an article about creating offline update repository for VMware virtual appliances and demonstrating the use of the VAMI web interface for updating and upgrading a VMware virtual appliance. However, from an automation perspective, the web interface is probably not the right tool for the job and this where the vamcli can help.

Usage: vamicli [options]
may be:
network          Network Configuration
update           Update Management
version          Version Information
service          Service Management

Use vamicli to see a list of options.

The vamicli is a command-line tool that is available on all virtual appliances built using VMware Studio and it provides a subset of the functionality of the VAMI web interface. Using the "update" operation, you can check for available updates as well as performing the installation of an update.

To check for the latest update just like you would using the VAMI web interface, you would run the following command:

vamicli update --check

To install the latest update, you would run the following command:

vamicli update --install latest --accepteula

Here is a screenshot example of going through both of these commands on a VIN 1.2 virtual appliance and then upgrading to VIN 2.0:

As you can see the process is pretty straight forward and this allows you to easily automate the updates of your virtual appliances without having to resort to the VAMI web interface.

For those of you who read my previous article and wish to configure a custom update repository without using the VAMI web interface, you can add the following configuration to /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/provider/provider-runtime.xml where value specifies the HTTP address to your update repository as you would configure using the VAMI web interface.

If you would like to configure additional authentication properties such as username and password, then the /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/provider/provider-runtime.xml should look like the following: The password value is encoded using base64, so to generate the encoding you can use the following python snippet (where password is the password you wish to encode:

python -c "import base64; print base64.b64encode('password')"

Note: The configuration changes above go into effect immediately and you can then use vamicli to perform both check and install operations.