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Automating the silent installation of Site Recovery Manager 6.0/6.1 w/Embedded vPostgres DB

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For customers looking to Automate the latest release of Site Recovery Manager 6.0 / 6.1 with an Embedded vPostgres DB, you may have found that my previous deployment scripts for SRM 5.8 no longer work with the latest release. The reason for this is that SRM 6.x now supports the Platform Services Controller (PSC) and in doing so, there are a couple of new silent installer flags that are now required. With the help of the SRM Engineering team, I was able to modify my script to include these new options for automating the silent installation of both SRM 6.0 and 6.1. You can download the new script called install_srm6x.bat.

Before using this script, I highly recommend that you take a look my previous article here which provides more details on how the script works in general.

There are 5 new silent options that have been introduced with SRM 6.x which are all required:

  • PLATFORM_SERVICES_CONTROLLER_HOST - The hostname of the Platform Services Controller
  • PLATFORM_SERVICES_CONTROLLER_PORT - The port for the PSC, default is 443 (recommend leaving this the default)
  • PLATFORM_SERVICES_CONTROLLER_THUMBPRINT - PSC SSL SHA1 Thumbprint (Must be in all CAPS)
  • SSO_ADMIN_USER - The SSO Administrator account (e.g. *protected email*)
  • SSO_ADMIN_PASSWORD - The SSO Administrator password

In addition to the above options, you will still need to populate the following options below and the script outlines which options need to be modified before running the script.

  • SRM_INSTALLER - The full path to the SRM 6.x installer
  • DR_TXT_VCHOSTNAME - vCenter Server Hostname
  • DR_TXT_VCUSR - vCenter Server Username
  • DR_TXT_VCPWD - vCenter Server Password
  • VC_CERTIFICATE_THUMBPRINT - vCenter Server SSL SHA1 Thumbprint (Must be in all CAPS)
  • DR_TXT_LSN - SRM Local Site Name
  • DR_TXT_ADMINEMAIL - SRM Admin Email Address
  • DR_CB_HOSTNAME_IP - SRM Server IP/Hostname
  • DR_TXT_CERTPWD - SSL Certificate Password
  • DR_TXT_CERTORG - SSL Certificate Organization Name
  • DR_TXT_CERTORGUNIT - SSL Certification Organization Unit Name
  • DR_EMBEDDED_DB_DSN - SRM DB DSN Name
  • DR_EMBEDDED_DB_USER - SRM DB Username
  • DR_EMBEDDED_DB_PWD - SRM DB Password
  • DR_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME - Windows System Account to run SRM Service

Note: If you deployed either your vCenter Server or PSC using FQDN, be sure to specify that for both DR_TXT_VCHOSTNAME and PLATFORM_SERVICES_CONTROLLER_HOST. This is a change in behavior compared to SRM 5.8 which only required the IP Address of the vCenter Server.

If you run into any issues, you can take a look at the logs that are generated. From what I have seen, you will normally get a 1603 error code which you need to step back through the logs and eventually you will see the actual error.

Docker Container for the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC)

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The Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) is an extremely useful tool for vSphere Administrators and has been bundled as part of vCenter Server (Windows and the vCenter Server Appliance) since vSphere 6.0. One feature that is only available in the VCSA's version of RVC is the VSAN Observer which is used to capture and analyze performance statistics for a VSAN environment for troubleshooting purposes.

For customers who are still using the Windows version of vCenter Server and wish to leverage this tool, it is generally recommended that you deploy a standalone VCSA just for the VSAN Observer capability which does not require any additional licensing. Although it only takes 10 minutes or so to setup, having to download and deploy a full blown VCSA to just use the VSAN Observer is definitely not ideal, especially if you are resource constrained in your environment. You also may only need the VSAN Observer for a short amount of time, but it could take you longer to deploy and in a troubleshooting situation, time is of the essence.

I recently came across an internal Socialcast thread and one of the suggestion was why not build a tiny Photon OS VM that already contained RVC? Instead of building a specific Photon OS that was specific to RVC, why not just create a Docker Container for RVC? This also means you could pull down the Docker Container from Photon OS or any other system that has Docker installed. In fact, I had already built a Docker Container for some handy VMware Utilities, it would be simple enough to just have an RVC Docker Container.

The one challenge that I had was that the current RVC github repo does not contain the latest vSphere 6.x changes. The fix was simple, I just copied the latest RVC files from a vSphere 6.0 Update 1 deployment of the VCSA (/opt/vmware/rvc and /usr/bin/rvc) and used that to build my RVC Docker Container which is now hosted on Docker Hub here and includes the Dockerfile in case someone was interested in how I built it.

To use the RVC Docker Container, you just need access to a Linux Container Host, for example VMware Photon OS which can be deployed using an ISO or OVA. For instructions on setting that up, please take a look here which should only take a minute or so. Once logged in, you just need to run the following commands to pull down the RVC Docker Container and to star the container:

docker pull lamw/rvc
docker run --rm -it lamw/rvc

ruby-vsphere-console-docker-container-1
As seen in the screenshot above, once the Docker Container has started, you can then access RVC like you normally would. Below is an quick example of logging into one of my VSAN environments and using RVC to run the VSAN Health Check command.

ruby-vsphere-console-docker-container-0
If you wish to run the VSAN Observer with the live web server, you will need to map the port from the Linux Container Host to the VSAN Observer port which runs on 8010 by default when starting the RVC Docker Container. To keep things simple, I would recommend mapping 80->8010 and you would run the following command:

docker run --rm -it -p 80:8010 lamw/rvc

Once the RVC Docker Container has started, you can then start the VSAN Observer with --run-webserver option and if you connect to the IP Address of your Linux Container Host using a browser, you should see the VSAN Observer Stats UI.

Hopefully this will come in handy for anyone who needs to quickly access RVC.

Content Library Tech Preview at VMworld Europe 2015

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For those of you who were fortunate enough to attend the Content Library Technical Deep Dive session (#5106) at VMworld Europe several weeks back and stayed until the very end, you were treated to an exclusive sneak peak demo. The demo was well received from what I heard, especially having been one of the most popular feature requests when talking to customers. I know the Content Library Engineering team has been working hard on this feature and I thought what better way than to show it off at VMworld!

I recently had a meeting with the Content Library Dev Manager (Pratima Rao) who also had presented at VMworld Europe and I just got the green light to share the demo with my readers. As a reminder, this is a Tech Preview and I encourage you to check out the disclaimer below if you have any questions related to the delivery of this feature 🙂 So without further ado, here is the Tech Preview video that was demo'ed at VMworld.

Note: There is no audio to the video, but for those interested in what is happening in the video, here is a quick summary. Today, you can upload and manage ISO images within the Content Library, however when trying to mount an ISO from the Content Library, the workflow is not as straight forward as it could be. In a future update of vSphere, you will now have a new option to directly mount an ISO from the Content Library. The demo starts off by showing some ISOs that have already been uploaded to an existing Content Library. We can then access those ISOs by going to the Virtual Machine settings and using the familiar mount ISO workflow to access the content. You will see that there is now a new option to mount an ISO from the Content Library and you will be presented with a filtered list of all files with .iso extension. Once you have selected the the ISO, the VM will mount it like you normally would from a vSphere Datastore or from the client system. Some additional things to note is that you can also filter by searching for specific content by using the search box in case you have multiple Content Libraries. Lastly, there are some useful metadata in the columns fields when looking through your ISOs which could help with further identifying the content you are interested in.

Disclaimer: This is an early Tech Preview and the overview of new technology represents no commitment from VMware to deliver these features in any generally available product. Features are subject to change, and must not be included in contracts, purchase orders, or sales agreement of any kind. Technically feasibility and market demand will affect final delivery. Pricing and packaging for any new technologies features discussed or represented have not been determined

Content Library Tech Preview at VMworld Europe 2015 from lamw on Vimeo.