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Building minimal vSphere demo lab using VMware Fusion/Workstation with only 8GB memory?

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After tweeting this update last week, I received quite a few questions on how I was able to squeeze a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) & ESXi 6.0 Update 1 along with a VMware Photon VM, all running on my Mac Book Air with only 8GB of memory. Although, I was not able to make use of my demo which was for my vSphere Content Library session at VMworld Europe this week; I thought I would still share the details on how I built this vSphere lab environment which could come in handy for others.

I wanted to run everything on my Mac Book Air primarily for the convenience factor so I did not have to bring my Mac Mini which may not be ideal for traveling aboard. The performance and responsiveness of the environment was actually pretty good and I was able to also access the vSphere Web Client using Google Chrome as well as OS X terminal for CLI operations without any problems. It definitely helps if you place all VMs on SSDs, which is especially useful if swapping occurs since we are overcommitting the physical memory.

minimal-vsphere-demo-lab-on-fusion-or-workstation-with-only-8GB-of-memory-3
Below are the instructions for building this environment and here is a quick summary of the expected memory configuration for the three VMs.

Virtual Machine Memory
Embedded vCenter Server Appliance VM 5GB
ESXi VM 3GB
Photon VM 384 MB

Step 1 - Download the VCSA & ESXi 6.0 Update 1 ISO (or any other version you wish to run). You will need to extract the contents of VCSA ISO and the OVA is located in /vcsa/vmware-vcsa and you will need to add the .ova extension.

Step 2 - We will need to configure memory overcommitment for VMware Fusion/Workstation to allow for the majority of the memory to be swapped to be able to run our minimal vSphere environment. You will need to set the value of prefvmx.minVmMemPct to 25 by adding the following line to the respective configuration file shown in the table below.

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = 25

Hypervisor Configuration File
VMware Workstation C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini
VMware Fusion /Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/config

Step 3 - Deploy the VCSA OVA to either your VMware Fusion or Workstation deployment and ensure you do not power on the VM. We will need to make the following edits to the VCSA's VMX file to ensure it is properly configured when it is powered on. Below is an example of the VMX parameters you will need to add before powering on the VM.

guestinfo.cis.deployment.node.type = "embedded"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.domain-name = "vghetto.local"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.site-name = "vghetto"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.password = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr.family = "ipv4"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr = "192.168.1.54"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.pnid = "192.168.1.54"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.prefix = "24"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.mode = "static"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.dns.servers = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.gateway = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.passwd = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.ssh.enabled = "true"

Step 5 - Once the VCSA has successfully been configured and you can connect to it using the vSphere Web Client, you can then power it off and reduce the memory from 8GB to 5GB.

Step 4 - Create a new VM using the ESXi 6.x GuestOS type for running your Nested ESXi VM and stick with the defaults of 4GB of memory to be able to install ESXi. Once the VM has been created, go ahead and install ESXi using the ISO as you normally would.

Step 5 - Once the ESXi VM has successfully been installed and booted up, you can then power it off and reduce the memory from 4GB to 3GB.

Step 6  (Optional) - If you wish to play with VMware Photon, you can also install Photon using the ISO which can be downloaded from here or deploy using the OVA which can be downloaded from here.

For folks who have more memory in their system, you could add an additional two Nested ESXi VMs to then run a full VSAN setup and then you will have a pretty powerful, with minimal resource footprint that you can bring with you anywhere to run demos or for development and testing purposes. I also highly recommend making use of the "Suspend" operation when you need to quickly get access to memory or run other applications and this also allows you to quickly resume the entire environment in just a few seconds without having to power down the entire setup which will take much longer.

Instant Clone PowerCLI cmdlets Best Practices & Troubleshooting

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I was fortunate to have been given early access to the VMFork (Instant Clone) PowerCLI cmdlets to help provide early feedback and usability improvements before it was released to customers. Having spent some time with the Fling, I have learned a thing or two about how Instant Cloning works and some of the caveats or gotchas while creating the customization scripts that are used as part of the Instant Clone workflows. I wanted to put together a quick reference on some of my findings as well as well as other recommendations from Engineering who have worked closely with the Instant Clone feature.

The idea is to have this as a living document which I will update as new tips and tricks are identified.

Best Practices

  • Ensure VMware Tools is installed inside the guestOS and also good time to ensure you are running the latest
  • Both Pre/Post Customization scripts are uploaded to /var/tmp by the Enable-InstantCloneVM cmdlet
  • Do not delete Child VMs directly on ESXi, manage it through vCenter Server. There is currently a known issue in which deleting Child VMs will also delete the Parent VM's disk
  • Additional custom variables can be passed to the post-customization script by adding to the -ConfigParams array of variables.
    • An example could be passing in two custom properties called "foo" and "bar" which would look like:

    @{foo = "val1";bar ="val2"}

    • To retrieve the variable "foo" and "bar" from within the post-customization script, you would issue the following commands:

    vmtoolsd --cmd "info-get guestinfo.fork.foo"
    vmtoolsd --cmd "info-get guestinfo.fork.bar"

  • A Forked Child VM will also have a duplicate MAC Address which needs to be updated as it is not automatically picked up.
      • You can either manually set it by retrieving the guestinfo.fork.ethernet0.address with the post-customization script.
      • An easier way would be to reload it based on the guestOS type. On a Linux system, you can use the modprobe command like the following (Submited by George Hicken):

    modprobe -r vmxnet3;modprobe vmxnet3

  • A Forked Child VM may also have identical kernel entropy pools which means semi-predictable RNG, possibly including TCP sequence numbers (Submited by George Hicken)
  • A Forked Child VM's system clock may also be out of date (until you call hwclock --hctosys or similar) which can cause problems with ordering of file timestamps (Submited by George Hicken)
  • Shared host keys if you are using a PKI system or identical asset identifiers in the case of Windows and any sort of AD infrastructure would also need to be either removed prior or updated after a Child VM is created (Submited by George Hicken)
  • Instant Cloning Nested ESXi has been a bit tricky due to a known issue with the VMware Tools for Nested ESXi. I have found that manually preparing the guest prior to Instant Cloning has yield better results. For more information on how to Instant Clone Nested ESXi, check out the blog post here
  • Powering off the Parent VM means that the VM is no longer quiesced and this also means that new Child VMs can not be instantiated until all existing Forked Child VMs have been powered off and the Parent VM has been re-quiesced
  • If you plan on downloading or installing additional software packages on the Parent VM, it is recommended that you perform that operation directly in the VM and not within the pre-customization script. I have noticed that if pre-customization takes too long, the quiesce operation eventually fails even though the operations within the pre-customization script executed successfully.
  • To ensure Forked Child VMs do not contain duplicate disk ID's from Parent VM such as setting up a VSAN environment using Instant Clone Nested ESXi, add the disks after Forked Child VMs have been created.
  • For additional OS Customization Scripts, be sure to check out the Instant Clone community customization script repository and consider contributing back scripts that you have developed.
  • When you hard reset or power off on a child VM it will respawn from the parent, soft resets will not respawn (Submitted by Alan Renouf)

Troubleshooting

  • Instant Clone guestOS logs are stored in /var/tmp/quiesce.logvmfork-logs
  • Consider enabling tracing within your customization scripts. An example of this for a shell script is using

    set -x

  • Add additional echo or print statements like Start/Stop of certain sections like Pre/Post which can aide in reviewing the Instant Clone logs as seen in the screenshot above
  • For Instant Cloning Nested ESXi guestOSes, I recommend taking a snapshot after you have prepared the guest and removed any system specific information. This allows you to quickly revert back to a known state for ease of debugging. I found this to be very useful to be able to start back a known clean state while developing the customization scripts for Instant Cloning Nested ESXi
  • A known issue that is mentioned in the documentation of the Instant Clone cmdlets is after enabling a ParentVM for Instant Cloning, is that it is no longer available for migration to another ESXi host. The reason for this is that after powering off the VM, the "parentEnabled" boolean flag is still set to "true" which prevents the migration. Currently, there is not a work around but hopefully this will be resolved in a future update of the cmdlets. You can see this by running the following PowerCLI snippet:

    (Get-VM "MyParentVM").ExtensionData.Config.ForkConfigInfo

 

How to VMFork aka Instant Clone Nested ESXi?

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vmfork-aka-instant-clone
The VMware Fling's team recently released an update to the existing PowerCLI Extensions which now exposes the new VMFork aka Instant Clone capability that was introduced in vSphere 6.0. The Fling contains a set of PowerCLI Extension Modules which in turn provides new PowerCLI cmdlets for accessing the Instant Clone feature. The idea behind the Fling is to help VMware understand how customers would like to consume the Instant Clone feature not only from a CLI point of view but also from an API and UI standpoint. Prior to this, Instant Clone was only available through the use of either Horizon View or the Big Data Extensions product. I think this is a great opportunity for customers and partners to help shape how Instant Clone should be consumed more generally.

One of the use cases I had in my mind when I had first heard about the Instant Clone feature was to be able to quickly instantiate new Nested ESXi VMs. When I got the opportunity to help test out early prototypes of the Instant Clone cmdlet to help provide feedback and usability improvements, I knew I had to give Nested ESXi a try!

Requirements:

High level process:

  1. A "preparation" script will be manually uploaded & executed within the Nested ESXi VM (Parent VM) to prep the system for Instant Cloning
  2. As the Parent VM is quiesce, both the pre/post customization script will be uploaded to the Parent VM automatically. The "pre-customization" is also then executed within the Parent VM which properly setups the library path to the VMware Tools binary (applicable to ESXi 6.0 only) and is then placed in a ready state for creating Instant Clones
  3. As new Instant Clone (Child VMs) are spun up, the "post-customization" script is automatically executed to add additional configurations and most importantly ensure newly created Instant Cloned Nested ESXi VMs have unique network identities

Note: For Instant Cloning regular OSes, only step 2 and 3 are really needed. Due to a known issue with VMware Tools for Nested ESXi, I have found that it is easier to prepare the Nested ESXi VM prior to quiescing and creating Instant Clones from the Parent VM.

Instructions:

Step 1 - Download and install both PowerCLI 6.0 Release 1 & Instant Clone PowerCLI Extensions Fling.

Step 2 - Perform a fresh Nested ESXi 6.0 installation in a VM, do not configure additional settings outside of enabling ESXi Shell and SSH.

Step 3 - Download the Nested ESXi 6.0 Instant Clone Scripts which contains the following four files:

  • prep-esxi60.sh - Prepares the Nested ESXi VM and ensures that new Child VMs will not retain the Parent VM's MAC Address which is baked in several places
  • pre-esxi60.sh - Pre-customization script which is used to properly setup the library paths to use the VMware Tools daemon to retrieve guest properties from PowerCLI script
  • post-esxi60.sh - Post-customization script which is used to apply networking configuration and hostnames for example
  • vmfork-esxi60.ps1 - An example PowerCLI script which issues the Instant Clone cmdlets

Note: For out of the box use, the only script that needs to be modified is the PowerCLI "vmfork-esxi60.ps1" script, the rest of the scripts should work or require very little to no modifications assuming you have followed the instruction thus far.

Step 4 - Upload the prep-esxi60.sh to Nested ESXi 6.0 VM (Parent VM) and then execute it using either the ESXi Shell over SSH or through a VMRC session. If you use SSH, you will notice that the script hangs, that is because the VMkernel interface is deleted as part of the script.

Step 5 - Next, we need to make a few edits to the vmfork-esxi60.ps1 script to update the name of your ESXi VM, along with its credentials and the full path to both the pre and post customization scripts. Below is an example of the variables that you will need to edit:

$parentvm = 'vESXi6'
$parentvm_username = 'root'
$parentvm_password = 'vmware123'
$precust_script = 'C:\Users\lamw\Desktop\vmfork\esxi60\pre-esxi60.sh'
$postcust_script = 'C:\Users\lamw\Desktop\vmfork\esxi60\post-esxi60.sh'

The section shown below will also need to be edited which contains the customization properties which are then passed down to the guestOS for configuration as part of the Instant Clone process.

 $configSettings = @{
 'hostname' = "$vmname.primp-industries";
 'ipaddress' = "192.168.1.$_"; 
 'netmask' = '255.255.255.0'; 
 'gateway' = '192.168.1.1';
 }

Step 6 - Lastly, it is time to run the script by issuing the following command:

.\vmfork-esxi60.ps1

instant-clone-nested-esxi-0
If everything was successful, you should see a couple of new powered on Instant Cloned Nested ESXi VMs that have been fully customized and ready for use!

instant-clone-nested-esxi-1
Note: There have been a couple of times where newly Instant Clone VMs have not been properly customized and when looking in the Instant Clone logs under /var/tmp/quiesce.log you may find "Unable to fork" error message. I usually have to re-quiesce the Parent VM which I do so by reverting back to a snapshot that captures the state after Step 4. Once I re-run the PowerCLI script, I am able to successfully deploy N-Number of Instant Clone Nested ESXi VMs. For additional best practices and tips/tricks, be sure to check out this blog post here.

Big thanks to Jim Mattson for some of his earlier research and work on this topic which made implementing these scripts much easier.