WilliamLam.com

ESXi Google Authenticator Is Now A VMware Fling!

by // 6 Comments

Earlier this year I wrote an article about using Google's Authenticator application to provide 2-Factor Authentication for connecting to ESXi using either the ESXi Shell locally or remotely over SSH. I also documented the process for compiling and building your own custom ESXi VIB with the help of two VMware engineers (Hongkun Xi & Jian Ouyang). Though the process was not terribly difficult, it did require minor source code modification and building a custom ESXi VIB. This also meant that you were required to lower the security acceptance of your ESXi host to community supported which is not a recommended practice. In addition, the custom ESXi VIB only supported a single administrator account which was root and additional work was required to support multiple administrators.

Well it turns out that both Hongkun and Jian have been quite busy enhancing this project in their spare time and have just released an ESXi Google Authenticator Fling! The Fling is distributed as a custom ESXi VIB which is signed by VMware, so you no longer have to lower the security of your ESXi host. It supports both ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 and it allows for multiple administrators to login using Google Authenticator.

Here is a list of the features that are supported:

  • Two-Factor Authentication for ESXi Shell and SSH access
  • Supports multiple administrators login on esx5.1, and single admin (root) on esx5.0
  • Support for 30-second TOTP codes
  • Support for emergency scratch codes
  • Protection against replay attacks

To learn more about the Fling and instructions on setting up the ESXi Google Authenticator, be sure to visit the VMware Lab's site.

If you have any feedback or questions, be sure to leave a comment on the Fling's web page here.

How To Pronounce Some Of VMware's Acronyms

by // 8 Comments

VMware's announcement last week on the new vCloud Hybrid Services offering generated quite a bit of buzz and excitement. One thing that I had noticed on Twitter during the announcement as well as the days following was discussions around the pronunciation of the vCloud Hybrid Services acronym (vCHS). There were couple of "ways" that folks have heard it pronounced and I thought I write this fun little post and share what the "official" ways of pronouncing some of these acronyms are (at least from my understanding working at VMware)

Disclaimer: I have no comments on us putting little v's on everything 😉

Below are the top VMware products/features that I have heard multiple acronyms for and the controversial on how to properly pronounce each of them. I have also provided a link to Google translate which provides a nice text-to-speech (lower right bottom) so you can listen to each of the official pronunciation. If there are other pronunciations that you have heard or any corrections, feel free to leave a comment.

Product Official Other
vSphere OpenStack Virtual Appliance (VOVA) vo-va (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vo-va) N/A
VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) v-san (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-san) N/A
vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) v-f-r-c (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-f-r-c) N/A
vCloud Air (vCA) v-c-a (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-a) N/A
vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) v-chess (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-chess) v-cheese v-c-h-s
vRealize Air Compliance (vRAC) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations Insight (vRI) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations (vROPs) vee-rops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vee-rops) N/A
vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops) v-c-ops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-ops) v-cops
vRealize Automation (vR / vRAuto) v-ra (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-ra) vr-auto (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vr-auto) N/A
vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) v-cake (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-cake) v-c-a-c v-cac
vRealize Business (vRBus) N/A N/A
vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) N/A N/A
vCenter Log Insight (vC Log) v-c-log (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-log) Log Insight
vRealize Code Stream (vRCS) N/A N/A
vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) N/A N/A
vRealize Hyperic (vRH) N/A N/A
vRealize Application Services (vRAS) N/A N/A

VMware Tools For Apple Mac OS X Guests?

by // 3 Comments

With the release of vSphere 5, virtualizing Apple Mac OS X as a guest OS was possible and fully supported from VMware. To do so, you would need to be run ESXi on Apple hardware either the now deprecated Apple XServe 3.1 or an Apple Mac Pro. A comment that came up yesterday on Twitter was that VMware Tools did not exists for Mac OS X guests and this would make it difficult to manage Mac OS X guests on vSphere. I guess it may not be that well known or just an assumption, but VMware Tools does in fact exists for Mac OS X guests and it is also documented in the VMware Tools installation guide.

It is still amazing to me to see the number of guest OSes the vSphere platform supports and perhaps virtualizing Mac OS X is still relatively new for folks and hence the initial assumption about VMware Tools not being available. In any case, I thought I take you through a few screenshots of installing VMware Tools for a Mac OS X 10.7 guests running on my Apple Mac Mini.

In the screenshot below, we can see that VMware Tools is not detected in the guest OS and we have a option to install VMware Tools, so we go ahead and click on that.

This will mount the darwin.iso to the VM from the vmimages directory of the ESXi host and you can proceed with the VMware Tools installation.

Upon finishing the installation, you will be asked to reboot the guest OS and now when we take a look at the VM summary view, we can see VMware Tools is now running in our Mac OS X guests.

Note: For instructions on installing Apple Mac OS X as a guest OS on vSphere, please refer to this tech note.