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Using the New vCloud Networking and Security to Load Balance Multiple vSphere Web Client Servers

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If you followed my previous two articles Configuring Additional Windows vSphere Web Client 5.1 Servers & Configuring Additional VCSA 5.1 as vSphere Web Client Servers I demonstrated how easy it is to add additional vSphere Web Client Servers to provide additional connection load balancing as well as redundancy in accessing your vSphere 5.1 environment. The next logical step is to actually place a load balancer in front of all the vSphere Client Servers to provide a single entry point for users to connect to.

I did a quick search for some load balancer solutions for testing, but found that they were quite complex and non-intuitive to setup. Since this was for my home lab, I decided to try out the new vCloud Networking & Security 5.1 (previously known as vShield). This being my first time setting up a load balancer (usually a task given to Network Engineers), I was pleasantly surprised and shocked at how easy it was to deploy and configure a load balancer using the new vCloud Networking and Security. Instead of going through this step by step, I thought I record a quick video.

The video below shows how you can leverage the new vCloud Networking & Security 5.1 to deploy and configure a Load Balancer to load balance multiple vSphere Web Client Servers.

If you have not tried out the new vCloud Networking and Security, I highly recommend you give it a try, especially with all the new network and security features in the latest 5.1 release.

Changing GuestOS Type Using a Custom vCO Workflow in the vSphere Web Client

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Something you might not have noticed, is the fact that you can not change or modify the guestOS type after a virtual machine has been created in the new vSphere Web Client, this option is just grayed out.

Though this is a change in behavior compared to the old vSphere C# Client, I actually took this as an opportunity to try out one of the most interesting and unrealized feature in the vSphere 5.1 release. This feature being a tighter integration between vCenter Server and vCenter Orchestrator. This means that you can now take any of your existing vCO workflows or create new workflows and make them directly available to any of the vSphere objects within the new vSphere Web Client as a custom action. 

Note: A feature request/bug has already been filed with VMware to have the ability to change the Guest OS and Guest OS Version for a virtual machine after creation in the vSphere Web Client.

Here is an example of a custom workflow that I created called Change Guest OS Type and as you can see that it only shows up under the context of a virtual machine object in the vSphere Web Client. 

From my perspective, the use cases are endless as you can create ANY custom workflow to perform any action or series of operations that can span across VMware products as well as 3rd party systems and directly present them to your end users in the new vSphere Web Client. Not only that, users can specify which workflows they see by default on a given vSphere object and this can differ from user to user based on their daily set of tasks.

So going back to our scenario, here is a way to change the Guest OS and Guest OS Version using a custom vCO workflow.

Step 1 - Download Change Guest OS Type vCO workflow to local desktop.

Step 2 - Open up the vCO Workflow Client, you can do this by pointing your browser to your vCO Server and click on "Start Orchestrator Client" link.

Step 3 - Import the Change Guest OS Type vCO workflow from your desktop to your vCO Server

Step 4 - Next, we need to go to the vSphere Web Client to make this vCO workflow available on a particular vSphere object, in our case it is a virtual machine. On the home page of the vSphere Web Client, click on "vCenter Orchestrator" icon in the center pane or select it from the navigation pane on the left. Once you are in the vCenter Orchestrator configuration page, select the "Manage" tab and click on the "plus" icon.

In this view, you can specify which default vCO workflows are made available across the various vSphere objects. These can be modified or removed based on the frequency of workflow usage.

Step 5 - Locate the Change Guest OS Type vCO workflow on the left hand side and then click on the Add button. Finally, select type to be virtual machine as this workflow is only applicable to a VM and OK to save the settings.

If we take a look at the vCenter Orchstrator configuration page, we will see our new workflow is now listed as one of the defaults for a virtual machine object. You can edit and modify any of these based on the workflows you wish to see by default. I highly recommend you add workflows that you use frequently so you do not have to search through the entire list each time.

Finally, it is time to test drive our new workflow! Locate a virtual machine and right click on the object, in a second you should see a sub-menu for All vCenter Orchestrator Actions and then select our vCO workflow Change Guest OS Type which will start off a very familiar wizard.

The first screen is the object selected, which in our case is our virtual machine. You can of course change this, but we will leave it as it's context was automatically picked up.

The next screen is to select the Guest OS Family (Windows, Linux & Other) that you wish to modify your virtual machine to.

The last part is just to select the Guest OS Version which is provided as a list of the guest OSes based on your previous selection.

To apply the Guest OS change, just click finish and watch the vCO workflow execute.

Though the functionality of changing the Guest OS is not available in the new vSphere Web Client, you can still provide the same functionality to your end users through a custom vCO workflow which are now tightly integrated into the vSphere Web Client. Hopefully this sparks some ideas on other vCO workflows you can create or expose through the vSphere Web Client in your own environment. I know I have a few in mind 🙂

A big thanks goes out to Christophe Decanini for helping me with a few questions while creating this workflow.

Configuring Additional VCSA 5.1 as vSphere Web Client Servers

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In my previous article, I showed you how to configure additional vSphere Web Client 5.1 Servers for a Windows environment. For those interested in using the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) instead to configure additional vSphere Web Client Servers, here is the process.

Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes only, this is not officially supported by VMware. Please test this in a development environment before using it on actual systems.

Before getting started, it is very important to ensure you have proper DNS resolution (forward / reverse working) on all your VCSA's.

Step 1 - You will need to know the IP Address or hostname of your vCenter SSO Server (If you are using the VCSA, then it is the same address as your vCenter Server). Next, deploy a brand new VCSA and go ahead and configure the IP Address, hostname, etc. in preparation for the next step.

Step 2 - Create a script called configureVCSAvSphereWebClientStandalone.sh (this script reside on the new VCSA itself or on a remote host) which contains the following

#!/bin/bash
# William Lam
# www.virtuallyghetto.com

# User Configurations

VCENTER_SSO_IPADDRESS=172.30.0.181

## DO NOT EDIT BEYOND HERE ##

echo "Adding Lookup Service URL to /etc/vmware/ls_url.txt & /etc/vmware-sso/ls_url.txt"
echo "https://${VCENTER_SSO_IPADDRESS}:7444/lookupservice/sdk" > /etc/vmware/ls_url.txt;echo "https://${VCENTER_SSO_IPADDRESS}:7444/lookupservice/sdk" > /etc/vmware-sso/ls_url.txt;

echo "Retrieving ${VCENTER_SSO_IPADDRESS} SSL Certificate"
echo "" | openssl s_client -connect ${VCENTER_SSO_IPADDRESS}:7444 2> /dev/null 1> /tmp/cert

echo "Storing ${VCENTER_SSO_IPADDRESS} SSL Certificate in /etc/ssl/certs/VMware-Lookup-Service-Root-CA.pem"
openssl x509 -in /tmp/cert > /etc/ssl/certs/VMware-Lookup-Service-Root-CA.pem

echo "Registering vSphere Web Client with ${VCENTER_SSO_IPADDRESS}"
/usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-client/vsphere-client-sso-hook install --ls-server https://${VCENTER_SSO_IPADDRESS}:7444/lookupservice/sdk --user root --password vmware

 
You will need to change the VCENTER_SSO_IPADDRESS variable to the address of your vCenter SSO Server.

Step 3 - Set the script to executable by running the following command:

chmod +x configureVCSAvSphereWebClientStandalone.sh

Step 4 - You can either execute the script locally on the VCSA or my preferred method is just to execute it remotely by running the following command:

ssh r[email protected] < configureVCSAvSphereWebClientStandalone.sh

Note: Make sure to replace the IP Address with address of your VCSA

As part of the configuration, the vSphere Web Client service will automatically start up at the very end. Once the service has successfully started, you will be able to connect to the vSphere Web Client URL by going to https://[webclient-hostname-ip]:9443/vsphere-client and you now should be able to see all the vCenter Servers that have registered with the same vCenter SSO server.

Here is another view using the new VIN 1.2 (vSphere Infrastructure Navigator) to show that I have two vSphere Web Client servers (webclient1 and webclient2) registered to my primary vCenter SSO Server (vcenter51-1) as well as two additional vCenter Server (vcenter51-2 and vcenter51-3) that are also registered with the same SSO Server.

As you can see, if you need to add additional vSphere Web Client Servers, the VCSA can easily be configured to enable only this feature to help you scale out and provide additional capacity as well as redundancy. Stay tuned for some more details on configuring a Load Balancer to load balance multiple vSphere Web Client Servers.

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