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How to bootstrap the VCSA using the ESXi Embedded Host Client?

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In the past, I have written about various ways of "bootstrapping" vCenter Server (here and here) which can be useful for setting up greenfield vSphere deployments. This topic has always been of interest to me because it can be the most challenging to solve, especially when you only start out with a single ESXi host. Historically, these "bootstrapping" options have mostly been driven from a CLI standpoint which is not a bad thing when you think about it from an Automation standpoint and needing to replicate this a few dozen times. However, from a user experience point of view, it may not be as ideal, especially if this is an infrequent task. One of the other cool features of the ESXi Embedded Host Client (EHC) which recently had its v4 release is that it can be used to deploy Virtual Appliances stored in the OVF format.

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Upgrading ESXi itself is now possible with the new Embedded Host Client v4

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It looks like we just got an early Christmas gift from Etienne, George and the VMware Flings team with the release of v4 of the ESXi Embedded Host Client (EHC). One of the new features that I am most excited about is the ability to upgrade ESXi itself using the "Update" feature which was first introduced in EHC v3. In the previous release of EHC, you could install or patch any ESXi VIB using this interface which I had blogged about here. With the latest release, Etienne has expanded its functionality to not only allow for a VIB URL but also a metadata.zip URL which ESXi offline bundles contain.

Here is an example of using EHC v4 to upgrade an ESXi 6.0 host to ESXi 6.0 Update 1:

Step 1 - Download ESXi offline bundle of choice, in this example we are downloading the offline bundle for ESXi 6.0 Update 1:updating-esxi-using-EHC-v4-1

Step 2 - You will need to extract the contents of the offline bundle and then upload the content to either a vSphere Datastore or an HTTP accessible URL as shown in the screenshots below.

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Currently it is not possible to upload an entire directory using the Datastore Browser with EHC. This is something I have reported internally and hopefully will be fixed in a future update.

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Step 3 - Click on the "Help" menu on the upper right hand corner of the Embedded Host Client and select the "Update" option which should prompt you to specify a URL. You can either specify a local datastore path to the metadata.zip such as the following:

/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi600-201510001/metadata.zip

or you can specify an HTTP(s) URL to the metadata.zip like the following:

http://192.168.1.180/ESXi600-201510001/metadata.zip

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Step 4 - Once you click the "Update" button, you will be asked to confirm and then you should see task kicked off called "Install Host Patch V2". Once the task has completed, you will need to reboot the ESXi host for the changes to take effect. If you are interested in viewing the update logs without having to log in via SSH, you can click on the "Monitor" tab of the Host option and under "Logs", click on /var/log/esxupdate.log to see the progress.

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If you have more than one or two hosts, I definitely recommend uploading the extracted offline bundle onto a webserver or a shared vSphere Datastore which you can the access from multiple ESXi hosts. This is a very nice way to easily upgrade your ESXi hosts without having to go into the ESXi Shell or enable SSH. Pretty neat feature if you ask me! There are many other new enhancements included in this release, be sure to give them a try and let us know if you have any feedback by leaving a comment on my blog or better yet, directly on the Fling site.

What's new in Embedded Host Client v4

  • Host
    • Ability to change host acceptance level
    • Ability to edit lock down exception users
    • Ability to edit system swap settings
  • VM
    • VM list has been optimized for performance, reducing data download by a factor of 5.
    • Ability to edit VM advance options
    • Ability to edit VM video adapter settings
    • Add a PCI pass through device (unable to remove device though)
    • SRIOV support for Network card devices
    • Ability to change browser console keyboard layout (Japanese and German are the currently supported layouts)
    • Cmd+a or Ctrl+a to select all VMs in list
    • Soft-power off and reset if Tools is installed is now supported
  • General
    • New Tools and links menu under Help
    • Update mechanism can now take a URL or data store path to an metadata zipfile, allowing to update ESXi itself
    • Localization and internationalization (French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Chinese (traditional and simplified) and Korean
    • Ability to disable session timeout
    • A huge number of bugfixes and minor improvements

How to update AppCatalyst's default PhotonOS VM template w/Docker 1.9?

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For those of you using VMware's free AppCatalyst Hypervisor, you may have noticed that there is currently not a way to update to the latest Docker 1.9 Engine/Client using Photon's package manager, Tiny Dandified YUM (tndf). Although you can manually install Docker 1.9 on any deployed PhotonOS VMs from AppCatalyst, the only issue with that is that all VMs based off of the default PhotonOS template will still be running version 1.8, which means you would need to apply to do this on ever new VM creation.

Not ideal at the moment, but there is a simple fix which is to update the default PhotonOS template with Docker 1.9. We can easily this simply by leveraging AppCatalyst itself to update itself 😉 or rather its default PhotonOS VMDK. Below are the manual steps if you wish to walk through this yourself, but if you rather just run a simple script that will compeltely automate the entire process, just jump straight to the bottom of this article 🙂

Step 1 - Create a new temp PhotonOS VM (in my example, I'm calling it PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9) which we will use to install Docker 1.9. You can do so by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vm create PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9

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Step 2 - Power on the temp PhotonOS VM that you just created by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vmpower on PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9

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Step 3 - Retrieve the IP Address of the temp PhotonOS by running the following command (this could take up to a minute or so to display):

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst guest getip PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9

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Step 4 - We can now SSH to the temp PhotonOS by using the IP Address from the previous step. You will need to specify the private key to login to the PhotonOS by running the following command:

ssh -i /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/etc/appcatalyst_insecure_key photon@[IP-ADDRESS]

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Step 5 - Now we will download and install Docker 1.9 but before doing so we also need to grab the "tar" utility as it does not seem to be part of the default PhotonOS. Here is a one-liner that will automatically install the tar utility and then perform the download and install of Docker (Thanks to Massimo Re'Ferre for his original install steps, just polishing up his awesomeness). Copy and paste the snippet below which you will run that inside of the PhotonOS:

sudo tdnf -y install tar;curl -O https://get.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-1.9.1.tgz;tar -zxvf docker-1.9.1.tgz;sudo systemctl stop docker;sudo cp usr/local/bin/docker /usr/bin/docker;sudo systemctl start docker;rm -rf usr/;rm -f docker-1.9.1.tgz;exit

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Step 6 - Now that we have our PhotonOS updated with Docker 1.9, we just need to shut it down and replace the VMDK with AppCatalyst's default PhotonOS VMDK. Run the following command to find the name of your temp PhotonOS VMDK.

find "${HOME}/Documents/AppCatalyst/PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9" -name '*.vmdk'

Once you have the VMDK name, you should backup the original AppCatalyst's PhotonOS VMDK by running the following command:

sudo mv /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/photonvm/photon-disk1-cl1.vmdk /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/photonvm/photon-disk1-cl1.vmdk.bak

Next, we will copy our temp PhotonOS VMDK to AppCatalyst's default PhotonOS directory and replace its original VMDK by running the following command:

sudo cp ${HOME}/Documents/AppCatalyst/PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9/photon-disk1-cl2.vmdk /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/photonvm/photon-disk1-cl1.vmdk

Finally, we need to make sure the new VMDK has the correct permissions by running the following command:

sudo chmod 644 /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/photonvm/photon-disk1-cl1.vmdk

Step 7 - At this point, you can verify that your changes were successful by creating a new PhotonOS VM and once logged into the VM, you can run "docker version" to verify that you are now running Docker 1.9 as shown in the screenshot below.

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For those those of you who do not wish to go through the manual steps, here is a quick script called update_docker_client_in_appcatalyst.sh which automates this entire process describe in the instructions above. Here is a quick screenshot of a sample execution of the script. I am hoping the Photon team will be updating the tdnf online repo so that you can simple run yum -y update docker in the future.

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