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Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 1

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This has been a topic I have been wanting to write about for quite some time, especially as I get asked about this on fairly regular basis from both partners and customers. I normally point folks over to our official Virtual Appliance (VA) authoring tool, VMware Studio which includes a number of development resources to help get started. Studio is used by many of our partners when creating their VA offerings, although it may not be the easiest thing to get started with, it does provide a complete end-to-end solution.

Most recently, I found myself building out a couple of VAs for my own day to day use, including a custom PhotonOS OVA that allows me to configure a static network address during deployment through the use of custom OVF properties. The official PhotonOS OVA that VMware ships does not provide this option and automatically defaults to DHCP. If you want to setup a static IP Address, you would need to first deploy the VM and then login to the console or SSH (if you have DHCP enabled) and then manually update the networking settings.


For my use case, Studio was going to be overkill and not to mention it may not even support PhotonOS or other modern OSes in general. However, everything that is needed to build your own VA is actually available right in vCenter Server. This was the perfect opportunity and excuse for me to finally document *my* process, in case it can help others wanting to do the same, especially for a home lab setup. In Part 1, I will take you through the two important concepts of building your own VA and then in Part 2 and Part 3, we will take a look at building both a Linux and Windows VA. I will also publish a reference Linux and Windows implementation so that you can use that as a basis to build your own VA, which is not limited to just Linux or Windows, it can be ANY GuestOS that vSphere supports.

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Leveraging Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 for extremely fast Nested ESXi provisioning

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The idea of "Instant Cloning" a Nested ESXi VM (running ESXi in a VM) is not a new concept. In fact, I had shared a solution back in 2015 using the private VMFork APIs. However, what has changed is the ease of consumption, primarily due to the re-architecture of Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 (more details here and here) which resulted in a public and simplified API. Some of you might ask, why not simply clone a Nested ESXi VM or create a Link Clone? What benefit would I get by using Instant Clone?

The answer is not only speed, but the fact that the instantiated VM is fully operational and ready to start executing where as a traditional full clone or linked clone requires a full OS boot up that can take up to several minutes to deploy and configure. This may not sound like much for a small number of Nested ESXi VMs, but as you increase the number of instances, Instant Clone really shines while still maintaining speed and the instant availability of the VM. As you can imagine, this definitely opens up for some interesting use cases whether it be for personal home lab or educational purposes like VMware HOL. In addition, we also have customers who deploy Nested ESXi not only at high scale but also with a high churn rate for development purposes, think CI/CD type of a workload who can also benefit from Instant Clone.

So how fast are we talking about? Lets say you wanted to test out the latest version of VSAN in vSphere 6.7, you would normally deploy 3 Nested ESXi VMs, power them up and wait for them to be ready on the network. With Instant Clone, you can deploy three fully functional Nested ESXi VMs in just 30seconds! As the VMs are instantly available for consumption, you can start the VSAN enablement workflow immediately and even parts of that can be baked into the Instant Clone workflow. With the ease of provisioning Nested ESXi VMs, you can simply maintain a catalog of ESXi templates which are in "frozen" states and then leverage Instant Clone to deploy just-in-time Nested ESXi environments and discard them once you are done. Pretty slick if you ask me! and something I plan on using going forward.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi is still not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.

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