WilliamLam.com

How to build a customizable Raspberry Pi OS Virtual Appliance (OVA)?

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After posting the instructions on how to install Raspberry Pi (rPI) OS into a Virtual Machine running on ESXi-Arm, I was already thinking about an easier consumption method that not only benefited VMware customers interested in running rPI OS as a VM but also the larger rPI OS development community. Just imagine, you can now easily deploy, build and test multiple rPI OS/application on a single physical rPI and get all the benefits of vSphere that many customers have enjoyed for the past two decades. 

My goal was to build an rPI OS OVA that would enable some basic guest customization such as networking and configuring the password for the default pi user. As you can see from the screenshot below, I was able to accomplish this with minimal trial/error and works fantastic!


I was initially planning to release the rPI OS OVA as a VMware Fling which can then be made available to the community. However, due challenges in the way rPI OS is distributed today via an image file and the inclusion of packages that makes it difficult for redistribution, I decided to forgo the VMware Fling route and simply publish the instructions with some supplemental scripts that can be used to produce the same rPI OS OVA that I have built for my own personal use.

It would have been great if this could be made available and if anyone from Raspberry Pi organization is reading this and is interested in hosting the download, I would be more than welcome to provide you with OVA file.

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Quick Tip - How to use Apple Thunderbolt 2 ethernet adapter with ESXi 7.0 or greater

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I was doing some testing on my Apple 2018 Mac Mini with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1 release and I needed to setup a separate network connection as the onboard 10GbE was not working for me initially. I was out of ideas but I did remember that I still have my Apple Thunderbolt 2 to gigabit ethernet adapter which was something I had used quite a bit in the early days when I was using the Apple Mac Mini as my homelab system.

Like all recent Apple Mac's, the 2018 Mac Mini only supports Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports and obviously not compatibility with the network adapter. Luckily, I did have an official Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter lying around which would allow me to connect the network adapter to the Mac Mini and to my surprise, it was automatically detected by the latest release of ESXi!


This partially came in a surprise because the Apple network adapter uses the Broadcom tg3 driver and I was not 100% sure if the native Broadcom (ntg3) would automatically claim this device since it was never officially supported.


Its definitely good to know this ethernet adapter still works as long as you have a TB2 to TB3 converter adapter and this should also work for any Intel NUC that have Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Automating kubectl-vsphere login for vSphere with Tanzu

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Before you can start deploying workloads to your vSphere with Tanzu Cluster, you need to first download the vSphere Plugin for Kubectl and then use that to login to your Supervisor Cluster which will generate a Kubernetes (K8s) context file that is stored in .kube/config

Here is an example of using the vSphere Plugin for Kubectl:

./kubectl-vsphere login --server=10.10.0.64 -u *protected email* --insecure-skip-tls-verify


For interactive sessions this is fine and upon successfully entering your password when prompted, you can switch to the correct K8s context to begin your workload deployment. For folks interested in automation, the one downside today is that the plugin does not provide a way to specify your password using either a command-line argument or reading from a configuration file.

I have actually seen this topic come up a few times both internally and externally for those wanting to automate the end to end deployment of a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster and have gotten stuck on trying to figure a way around having to perform this required manual step.

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