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Hope to see you at VMworld 2015

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The VMworld 2015 Content Catalog just went live this morning and I am please to announce that I have two sessions that were accepted at both VMworld US and Europe. The first session will be a Technical Deep Dive on our new Content Library feature which was introduced in vSphere 6.0 and I will be co-presenting that with James Chang, one of the Content Library Engineers. The second session will be covering a topic that is near and dear to my heart which is the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and I will be covering some of the best practices along with some of the tips and tricks that you may not know about the VCSA. I hope to see you in one of these sessions and I look forward to meeting and chatting with some of my readers at VMworld!

INF5106 – Content Library Technical Deep Dive

What’s the best place to store and maintain your VM templates, ISOs, and vApps? How do you share them with other administrators and users in your organization or between two sites? The solution is a content library, a content management tool within vCenter that manages and replicates content across data centers. In this talk you will learn how to organize your VM templates for the best VM provisioning speed, pick up best practices for automatically sharing your content between sites, and understand how to migrate content from your existing vCloud Director to vCenter with the least amount of effort. And all this right from the vSphere client that you are already familiar with! Next, we will dive into advanced features like external webserver support (e.g. Amazon S3), HTTP mirroring for scale, and rapid sync using array replication technologies. Lastly, we will conclude the talk with a product demonstration showcasing the advanced content management and consumption use cases within a software defined data center

INF4528 – vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks

In this session, I will go through some of the best practices and considerations when deploying and managing the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I will walk through some of the changes between past releases and the new vSphere 6.0 release. In addition, I will also provide tips and tricks on using the VCSA as well as ways in migrating from a Windows based vCenter Server to the VCSA

Using latest PowerActions 1.5.0 to issue VMFS UNMAP API in vSphere 6.0 Web Client

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Last week, the popular PowerActions Fling was updated to version 1.5.0 which now finally adds support for vSphere 6.0. PowerActions is a vSphere Web Client Plugin that allows administrators to easily execute PowerCLI scripts against inventory objects within the vSphere Web Client. This is a very powerful capability that PowerActions is providing and allows users to easily extend new and custom operations that may not be available within the vSphere Web Client. One such example is being able to easily issue a VMFS UNAMP which in vSphere 5.5 was only available through the use of ESXCLI, I actually demonstrated how easy it is to provide this capability using PowerActions which you can read more about here.

With the release of vSphere 6.0, we now have the ability to issue a VMFS UNMAP using the vSphere API which I have blogged about here among other new vSphere 6.0 APIs. Given that PowerActions now supports vSphere 6.0, I figured this would be a good opportunity to take advantage of the new vSphere 6.0 API using the updated version of PowerActions. I have created a new PowerCLI script called Issue UNMAP 2.0 on Datastore.ps1 which now uses the new UnmapVmfsVolumeEx_Task vSphere API to perform the VMFS UNMAP. I have also submitted a new pull request for this example to Alan Renouf's PowerActions Github repository.

Here is a screenshot of my running the new VMFS UNMAP PowerActions operation against one of my vSphere Datastores and you can that it successfully completed in the Recent Tasks bar.

poweractions-vmfs-unmap
In addition to the new VMFS UNAMP operation that can be added as a PowerAction, here are just a few other examples of new vSphere 6.0 capabilities that you can easily extend into a PowerAction:

I am personally excited for the future and potential of PowerActions and I hope to see the PowerActions framework extend beyond just PowerCLI and support other scripting languages. I think this will be a very powerful capability that the vSphere Web Client can offer to our administrators, operators and developers.

Automating installation of VMware Tools for Mac OS X

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After publishing my recent article on automating the silent installation of VMware Tools for Linux guestOSes, I received a similar question regarding Mac OS X guests and whether the existing script would also apply. The answer is no since Mac OS X packages differ from the Linux installres, but it is possible to automate the installation of VMware Tools for Mac OS X guests.

After quickly looking into this, I realized there are actually several options that are available to customers and it would depend on how you would like to install VMware Tools and what platform you are running your Mac OS X guests on. I will share a couple of options which also includes existing solutions that have already been developed. At the end of the day, the choice will ultimately be up to the administrator on how he/she would like to proceed.

Option 1 – If you are a vSphere/ESXi customer running Mac OS X, you will probably want to mount the VMware Tools installer and then initiate an installation within the Guest. You can actually perform the entire operation within a single context by leveraging our vSphere API to issue the VMware Tools installer and then using the Guest Operations API to perform the installation.

Option 2 – Similar to the above option, if you do not wish to use the vSphere API, you can simply copy the darwin.iso (VMware Tools) image onto your Mac OS X guests and then perform the automated install. This would be the most simplistic option and would apply to running Mac OS X guests on either vSphere/ESXi or Fusion.

Option 3 – You can also download VMware Tools using VMware's online repository (thanks to Rich Trouton for sharing this tidbit) and then performing the installation which is very similar to Option 2. The only downside is if you are running Mac OS X on vSphere/ESXi, the status of VMware Tools will show "unsupported" as the version will differ from version distributed with vSphere/ESXi. In fact, Rich Trouton has an existing solution that he has published here which you can read more about.

If you are already familiar with using the vSphere API and are using vSphere/ESXi, I personally would go with Option 1 just because you can stay within a single context from an automation standpoint and not have to jump between different interfaces. If you not comfortable, want a quick solution or running just Fusion, then Option 2 and 3 would be ideal. Below is an example Gist demonstrating a simple shell script which implements Option 2 and Option 3 with a slight twist from what Rich has done which does not require Git.

Here's an example of running the script using Option 2:

automate-vmware-tools-mac-os-x
I am sure there are probably other methods out there, but the great news is that it is indeed possible to automate VMware Tools for Mac OS X guests 🙂

#!/bin/bash
# 1 = VMware Tools ISO is mounted from vSphere
# 2 = Download VMware Tools (assumes you can connect to internet)
INSTALL_METHOD=2
# Thanks to Rich Trouton for tip on Tools being available online
VMWARE_TOOLS_DOWNLOAD_URL=http://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/fusion/7.1.2/2779224/packages/com.vmware.fusion.tools.darwin.zip.tar
# DO NOT MODIFY BEYOND HERE #
VMWARE_TOOLS_INSTALLER_DIR="/Volumes/VMware Tools/Install VMware Tools.app/Contents/Resources"
VMWARE_TOOLS_INSTALLER_FILE="VMware Tools.pkg"
if [ $EUID -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Please run the script with sudo …"
exit 1
fi
if [ ${INSTALL_METHOD} == "1" ]; then
if [ -d "${VMWARE_TOOLS_INSTALLER_DIR}" ]; then
/usr/sbin/installer -pkg "${VMWARE_TOOLS_INSTALLER_DIR}/${VMWARE_TOOLS_INSTALLER_FILE}" -target /
echo "Please reboot the system for the installation to complete …"
fi
elif [ ${INSTALL_METHOD} == "2" ]; then
TMP_DIR=/tmp/osx-vmware-tools
mkdir -p "${TMP_DIR}"
VMWARE_TOOLS_TAR_FILE=com.vmware.fusion.tools.darwin.zip.tar
VMWARE_TOOLS_ZIP_FILE=com.vmware.fusion.tools.darwin.zip
VMWARE_TOOLS_ISO_FILE="payload/darwin.iso"
cd ${TMP_DIR}
# Download VMware Tools from online repo
curl -O "${VMWARE_TOOLS_DOWNLOAD_URL}"
# Extract the VMware Tools tar file
tar -xf "${VMWARE_TOOLS_TAR_FILE}"
# Unzip the VMware Tools zip file
unzip "${VMWARE_TOOLS_ZIP_FILE}"
# Mount VMware Tools ISO (similiar to vSphere/ESXi)
hdiutil attach "${VMWARE_TOOLS_ISO_FILE}"
# Perform installation
/usr/sbin/installer -pkg "${VMWARE_TOOLS_INSTALLER_DIR}/${VMWARE_TOOLS_INSTALLER_FILE}" -target /
# Detach mount & clean up
hdiutil detach '/Volumes/VMware Tools'
rm -rf "${TMP_DIR}"
echo "Please reboot the system for the installation to complete …"
else
echo "Invalid Selection"
fi

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