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How to evaluate the vSphere VCSA Beta running on VMware Fusion & Workstation?

10.13.2014 by William Lam // 17 Comments

If you are taking part in the vSphere Beta (available to public to sign up but still under NDA), you may have recently noticed a new milestone release (RC) that has been made available for download. Having been a long time Beta participant when I was customer and still continuing to do so in my current role, the best way to evaluate and test new VMware software is to of course run them on top of vSphere! I know this may not be an option for everyone and the next best thing would be to use VMware Fusion or Workstation.

For those of you who have tried to run the vSphere Beta of VCSA on VMware Fusion or Workstation, you may have found that it does not work as there are some input parameters that are required as part of the new VCSA deployment. These parameters leverages OVF properties which are currently not supported in VMware Fusion and Workstation and therefore the new injectOvfEnv option in ovftool can not be used.

Having said that, VMware Engineering is quite aware that this can be challenging for many customers as well as VMware Employees who make use of Fusion and Workstation on a daily basis. That is why they have built the VCSA to be quite flexible to support both vSphere as well as Fusion and Workstation, however the process may not be completely obvious for the latter. If you inspect the latest VCSA Beta OVA, which you will need to extract from the ISO, you will notice a series of "keys" that begin with guestinfo which is just leveraging custom key/value pairs for the OVF environment.

evaulate-vsphere-beta-vcsa-on-fusion-and-workstation-0
Ideally, these are passed in from the OVF Properties using either the vSphere Web Client or the new VCSA deployment tool. However, due to the lack of OVF Property support, it can also be passed in through the VMX file of the Virtual Machine.

Here are the steps to deploy the VCSA Beta using either VMware Fusion or Workstation:

Step 1 - Download the VCSA Beta which is available as an ISO

Step 2 - Extract the contents of the ISO and add the .ova extension to following file located in vcsa/vmware-vcsa (this is the VCSA OVA)

Step 3 - Upload the OVA using either VMare Fusion or Workstation (you can either double click or just go to File->Open) but make sure you do not power it on after deployment. (this is very important)

Step 4 - Locate the directory in which the VCSA was deployed to and open up the VMX file and append the following (make sure to change the IP information and passwords based on your environment):

guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr.family = "ipv4"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.mode = "static"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr = "192.168.1.90"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.prefix = "24"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.gateway = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.dns.servers = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.password = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.passwd = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.time.tools-sync = "True"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.ssh.enabled = "True"

Note: The example above is a very basic VCSA deployment which should suffice for the majority of you. If you wish to deploy a more complex scenario, you can inspect the VCSA OVA for additional parameters and see their expected values.

Step 5 - Once you have saved your changes, go ahead and power on the VCSA. At this point, the guestinfo properties that you just added will be read in by VMware Tools as the VCSA is booting up and the configuration will begin. Depending on the speed of your hardware, hopefully in a very short amount of time you will have a fully configured VCSA that is ready for your evaluation and testing.

Here is a screenshot of running the VCSA Beta on both VMware Fusion and Workstation:

evaulate-vsphere-beta-vcsa-on-fusion-and-workstation-1
evaulate-vsphere-beta-vcsa-on-fusion-and-workstation-2
If you wanted to take this one step further and automate the entire deployment, you can leverage the ovftool to deploy the OVA as shown with the Fusion example below:

'/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware OVF Tool/ovftool' --name=vmware-vcsa --acceptAllEulas --allowExtraConfig /PATH/TO/VCSA/OVA '/Users/lamw/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized'

and then append the specific configuration using either an echo or here-statement. You can also do the same on Windows leveraging either plain Windows Bat script or PowerShell.

Hopefully for those of you who only have access to Fusion or Workstation, you can now also take part in the vSphere Beta if you do not have a vSphere lab that can be used. I would also recommend checking out the vSphere Beta Community as there is a new contest that launched today for finding bugs in the latest RC release. Not only can you help improve the product through your feedback, you can also win some some $$$ in doing so!

Categories // Automation, ESXi, Fusion, OVFTool, vSphere, Workstation Tags // beta, fusion, guestinfo, guestinfo.ovfEnv, ova, ovftool, vcenter server appliance, VCSA, vSphere, workstation

Quick Tip - Handy ovftool 4.0 advanced options

07.01.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I recently had a need to deploy an OVA using ovftool on a Windows desktop and I ran into the following error:

Error: Could not lookup host: root

Since the environment I was deploying to did not have DNS, the failed hostname lookup was expected. This was pretty annoying with previous releases of ovftool but it looks like with the latest 4.0 version, there is a new advanced option called --X:disableHostnameResolve that would allow you to disable this check. Using the new version of ovftool and the advanced option, I was able to bypass the check and deploy the OVA.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Fusion, OVFTool, vSphere, Workstation Tags // injectOvfEnv, ovftool

Want a free VMware Workstation 10 License?

03.14.2014 by William Lam //

Last week, I gave away seven free VMware Fusion 6 Professional license worth a total of $903 USD to seven lucky readers as part of a fun give away for my fellow Twitter followers. I know a couple of you who were asking about VMware Workstation licenses and it looks like the Workstation team has just answered that call 🙂

vmware-workstation-licenseI have in my hands, seven VMware Workstation 10 licenses worth a grand total of $1,743 ($249 USD per license). I would like to give a big thanks to the VMware Workstation team for donating these seven licenses to me so that I could give away to my Twitter followers. If you are interested in learning more about VMware Workstation or have any feedback/questions for the Workstation team, you can follow and interact with them on Twitter at @vmw_workstation. One pretty neat feature of Workstation is the ability to manage your ESXi hosts including Free ESXi which really could come in handy.

So, if you want a super easy way to win a free VMware Workstation 10 license key, then CAREFULLY READ through the instructions below to see how you can score a free Workstation license!

How to Win:

  1. You must be following me on Twitter, I am at @lamw and I will be contacting winners through Twitter.
  2. Leave a short comment on this post on what this VMware Workstation license key would enable you to do, whether that is solving a particular problem or challenge.
  3. What is the one feature that you are most excited about for new users or what new feature would you like to see for existing VMware Workstation customers.
  4. Include your Twitter handle in the comment
  5. Must not be a VMware employee, I will check :)

Simple, right? I will randomly select seven winners from the list of comments in one weeks time, so make sure you leave your Twitter handle in the post else you will not be eligible to win. This is open to everyone, you do not need to live in the US to win.

Winners:

@Rob_Coote
@phil_wiffen
@MaureenCioe
@billyboskovski
@k00laidIT
@Hazy2k10
@lukeaw

Categories // Workstation Tags // workstation

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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