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Want to test drive Apple OSX 10.10 Yosemite? Try it on VMware Fusion & vSphere

06.06.2014 by William Lam // 26 Comments

Earlier this week, Apple announced their next version of Mac OSX at their annual developer's conference called OSX 10.10 Yosemite. For those of you who are part of Apple's Development Program and would like to test drive the latest Developer Preview, you can quickly and safely do so by running it inside a Virtual Machine using either VMware Fusion or VMware vSphere.

Disclaimer: It is important to note that Mac OSX 10.10 is not officially supported by VMware because Apple has not officially GA'ed, however it will run fine for the most part.

UPDATE (07/26/14) - I was able to install the latest OSX Yosemite public beta using the same instructions listed below.

It is highly recommended that you perform an upgrade using the .app from an existing installation of Mac OSX to Yosemite for optimal performance. There are currently some known issues with a fresh installation which may cause some problems, this is currently being investigated by VMware Engineering.

Installing OSX Yosemite on Fusion:

For Fusion users, I recommend using the latest VMware Fusion 2014 Tech Preview and selecting OSX 10.9 as the guestOS. If you have any feedback on the Tech Preview of Fusion, be sure to leave a comment on the Fusion Community Forums. Here are a couple of screenshots going through the upgrade as well as a successful boot of Mac OSX 10.10.

Installing OSX Yosemite on vSphere:

For vSphere users, you will need to be running vSphere 5.5 and using Virtual Hardware 10 which provides support for Mac OSX 10.9 as a guestOS. If you need to perform a fresh installation of OSX, you can follow the detailed instructions here which requires a quick format of the underlying virtual disk before starting the installation. Below is a screenshot of Mac OSX 10.10 running on vSphere on top of my Apple Mac Mini.

Here are a couple of things I noticed about the current Beta of OSX 10.10:

Installing VMware Tools does not work and just seems to hang. If you need VMware Tools, make sure you install it before upgrading
After upgrading from OSX 10.9 to 10.10 running on VMware Fusion 6.0, it seems to hang after reboot
It feels a bit sluggish, potentially from being the first Beta drop

Even with some of these issues, I still think it is pretty cool that you can run a Beta version of OSX that was literally released a couple of days ago. I know VMware Engineering is already hard at work on figuring out the issues and optimizing OSX 10.10 to run just as smooth as past releases of Mac OSX. I am confident by the time Mac OSX Yosemite GA's, that it will be running flawlessly! I also would like to thank Regis Duchesne for sharing some tips on getting OSX 10.10 up and running.

Quick Tip - Offline viewing of vSphere API & other API docs using Dash

06.06.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

As a frequent consumer of the vSphere API, a must have bookmark for all my systems (work/personal) is the vSphere API Reference document. In my opinion, This is a must have for anyone that is serious about vSphere Automation and having it be an online document, it allows you to quickly search for a specific property or method. The problem with an online document of course is that if you are not connected to the internet, you will not have access to it. VMware does provides an offline version for viewing which is bundled within the vSphere Management SDK.

This morning when I woke up, I was going through the list of sites that I read on a regular basis such as Y Hacker News and the top entry at the moment was "Dash - Beautiful instance offline docs for almost everything". I quickly realized this was not the first time I had heard of this tool, my good friend Timo Sugliani had actually introduced me to Dash a couple months back and he even mentioned it might be possible to view the vSphere API documents. After installing Dash, I did not see the vSphere API docs from what I recall and I just never had time to play with it again. I figure it has been awhile, maybe I should give it another try? I updated Dash this morning to latest version and noticed that the vSphere API documentation is now available and covers vSphere 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5.

Once you have downloaded the specific vSphere API documentation, you can then quickly browse or search through the different class objects, methods, properties and enumeration values. You can see from the screenshot below, it will automatically search through all your documentation include online searches on such as Google and Stack Overflow which I thought was pretty neat.

In addition to being able to easily view the vSphere API documentation offline, but you can also view other types of API documentation. Dash currently supports over 290+ documentation sets and you can even create your own doc sets and contribute them back to Dash. The other neat thing about Dash which I have not tried yet is the plugin integration with popular IDEs like Sublime, Textmate, Eclipse to just name a few. The only downside I see at the moment is that Dash is only for Mac OSX, but it looks like there might be plans to support a Windows version later this year. If you work with a lot of API documentation, Dash might be something you may want to check out. I know I will start leveraging it when I am offline.

Exploring VSAN APIs Part 10 – VSAN Disk Health

06.04.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

In additional to monitoring storage and host utilization of your VSAN Cluster, the health of the individual disks contributing to your VSAN Cluster is probably one of, if not the most important thing to keep an eye on. In the vSphere Web Client, this information can be accessed by navigating over to the VSAN Disk Management tab as seen in the screenshot below.

Even though this information is available from the UI, it would also be useful to be able to extract this information programmatically using the vSphere API either for external monitoring or informational purposes. I recently had did some work on this, so I figure I might as well share an example script that demonstrates this functionality. To do so, I of course created a sample vSphere SDK for Perl script called vsanDiskHealth.pl

Disclaimer: These scripts are provided for informational and educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

The script leverages the QueryPhysicalVsanDisks() API which accepts a list of properties to collect on an individual VSAN Disk. You can also leave the method blank, in which all properties will be returned. For our use case, we are collecting a sub-set of the properties which includes: owner, uuid, isSsd, capacity, capacityUsed, disk_health.

To check the current health of your VSAN Disks, you just need to specify the name of a VSAN enabled Cluster:

./vsanDiskHealth.pl --server .vcenter55-1 --username root --cluster VSAN-Cluster