Search Results for: nested esxi

Quick Tip - Using HTTP(s) proxy for connecting to 3rd party Content Library in vSphere 6.0

05.27.2015 by William Lam // 11 Comments

A couple of weeks back I was asked by a customer who was interested in subscribing to my 3rd Party Content Library which hosted several of my Nested ESXi and VSAN OVF Templates. The problem was that in his environment, like many others, he did not have direct access internet access from within vCenter Server for the Content Library subscription to be created. The customer was wondering if the Content Library feature supported a proxy server which is a very common method for Enterprise customers to provide access to external sites requiring internet access. The Content Library Service does provide a way to configure a proxy server and below are the instructions for configuring both the VCSA and vCenter Server for Windows.

UPDATE (09/27/17): As of vSphere 6.5 Update 1, the Proxy Configurations for the Content Library has been pulled directly into the service itself and you no longer have to manually edit the Java wrapper.conf files. You can now access the proxy configurations by using the vSphere Web Client going to Administration->System Configuration->Services->Content Library Service->Transfer Service as shown in the screenshot below. For 6.0 and 6.5, you will need to continue to follow the instructions below on editing the wrapper.conf file.

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)

The configuration file that you will need to edit is /usr/lib/vmware-vdcs/wrapper/conf/wrapper.conf and below are the three lines to add:

wrapper.java.additional.20=-Dhttps.proxySet=true
wrapper.java.additional.21=-Dhttps.proxyHost=proxy.server.com
wrapper.java.additional.22=-Dhttps.proxyPort=8080

Once you have saved your changes, you will need to restart the Content Library service for the changes to go into effect by running the following command:

/etc/init.d/vmware-vdcs restart

The proxy server will now be used and assuming the proper ACL's have been added on the proxy server itself to allow traffic from your vCenter Server to the appropriate destination site, you should now be able to use the Content Library to subscribe to my 3rd Party Content Library.

vCenter Server for Windows

The configuration file that you will need to edit is C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\vdcs\wrapper\conf\wrapper.conf and below are the three lines to add:

wrapper.java.additional.20=-Dhttps.proxySet=true
wrapper.java.additional.21=-Dhttps.proxyHost=proxy.server.com
wrapper.java.additional.22=-Dhttps.proxyPort=8080

Once you have saved your changes, you will need to restart the Content Library service for the changes to go into effect by going to the Windows services panel.

Quick Tip - How to upload files to vCloud Air On-Demand using ovftool?

05.04.2015 by William Lam // 4 Comments

I have recently spent some time playing around with the new vCloud Air On-Demand offering and with the free $300 credit promotion which I am currently using, it is an easy and painless way of evaluating vCloud Air. A common operation that many of you will most likely be performing when you first get setup is uploading content to be used within vCloud Air. You can do this by either using the UI in vCloud Director OR you can use one of my favorite command-line tools called ovftool.

To assist with using ovftool, I have created a simple shell script called upload-to-vca.sh which wraps ovftool and you simply just need to fill out a couple of required variables and the script will automatically handle the rest.

Note: Though the script is is specifically for a *nix/Mac OS X environment, the ovftool syntax is exactly the same for a Windows based environment. You just need to change the variable type and can then easily get this working on a Windows system using a simple batch or PowerShell script.

There are four pieces of information that you will need to pull from your vCloud Air On-Demand environment which will map to the following variables:

VCA_URL - This is the vCloud Director URL found when logging into your vCloud Air On-Demand instance
VCA_ORG_NAME - This is the name of your Organization for your vCloud Air On-Demand, it will be in a UUID type format
VCA_ORG_VDC_NAME - This is the name of your Virtual Datacenter that you would need to create when initially logging int
VCA_CATALOG_NAME - This is the vCloud Director Catalog name, by default it is called "default-catalog" unless you go into vCloud Director to create a custom one

To find the VCA_URL you just need to look at the base of the URL when logged into your vCloud Air On-Demand instance, in my example it is us-california-1-3.vchs.vmware.com and to find the VCA_ORG_VDC_NAME you will look under the "Virtual Data Centers" section as seen in the screenshot below. In my example, it is called vGhetto-VDC

To find the next two variables, you will need to open up the vCloud Director UI. To do so, just right click on the name of your VDC and select "Manage Catalogs in vCloud Director". Once logged in, you can find the VCA_ORG_VDC_NAME by looking at the URL after the /org/ entry (which you can copy/paste) but it is also displayed at the upper left corner when you first log in. In my example, it is the b51b26... Finally, to find the VCA_CATALOG_NAME you just need to click on the Catalogs tab and by default vCloud Air will use default-catalog as the name of your private Catalog. If you decide to create a new one, then you will need to use that name instead.

Once we have all four of the variables filled out based on our vCloud Air On-Demand instance, we also need to specify within the script whether we want to upload an ISO/floppy image or an OVA/OVF. There are two examples in the script and just un-comment the one you wish to run. Once you have completed editing the script, you can go ahead and run it and it will prompt you for your vCloud Air credentials which is what you used to initially sign into vchs.vmware.com.

Here is an example of uploading an OVF to my vCloud Air On-Demand VDC:

In my environment, I have uploaded both a Nested ESXi OVF template which should be stored under the vApp Tempalates tab as well as an ESXi 6.0 ISO which will be stored under the Media & Other section as shown in the screenshots below.

At this point, I can now consume both my OVF and ISO either directly in the vCloud Director UI or I can jump back to my vCloud Air UI and consume it that way as shown in the screenshot below.

If you have a lot content to upload or just prefer using the CLI (like I do), then this is a great way to easily upload content so that it is accessible in vCloud Air.

Home Labs made easier with VSAN 6.0 + USB Disks

03.04.2015 by William Lam // 23 Comments

VSAN 6.0 includes a large number of new enhancements and capabilities that I am sure many of you are excited to try out in your lab. One of the challenges with running VSAN in a home lab environment (non-Nested ESXi) is trying to find a platform that is both functional and cost effective. Some of the most popular platforms that I have seen customers use for running VSAN in their home labs are the Intel NUC and the Apple Mac Mini. Putting aside the memory constraints in these platforms, the number of internal disk slots for a disk drive is usually limited to two. This would give you just enough to meet the minimal requirement for VSAN by having at least a single SSD and MD.

If you wanted to scale up and add additional drives for either capacity purposes or testing out a new configurations, you are pretty much out of luck, right? Well, not necessary. During the development of VSAN 6.0, I came across a cool little nugget from one of the VSAN Engineers where USB-based disks could be claimed by VSAN which could be quite helpful for testing in a lab environment, especially using the hardware platforms that I mentioned earlier.

For a VSAN home lab, using cheap consumer USB-based disks which you can purchase several TB's for less than a hundred dollars or so and along with USB 3.0 connectivity is a pretty cost effective way to enhance hardware platforms like the Apple Mac Mini and Intel NUCs.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and should not be used in Production or evaluation of VSAN, especially when it comes to performance or expected behavior as this is now how the product works. Please use supported hardware found on the VMware VSAN HCL for official testing or evaluations.

Below are the instructions on how to enable USB-based disks to be claimable by VSAN.

Step 1 - Disable the USB Arbitrator service so that USB devices can been seen by the ESXi host by running the following two commands in the ESXi Shell:

/etc/init.d/usbarbitrator stop
chkconfig usbarbitrator off

Step 2 - Enable the following ESXi Advanced Setting (/VSAN/AllowUsbDisks) to allow USB disks to be claimed by VSAN by running the following command in the ESXi Shell:

esxcli system settings advanced set -o /VSAN/AllowUsbDisks -i 1

Step 3 - Connect your USB-based disks to your ESXi host (this can actually be done prior) and you can verify that they are seen by running the following command in the ESXi Shell:

vdq -q

Step 4 - If you are bootstrapping vCenter Server onto the VSAN Datastore, then you can create a VSAN Cluster by running "esxcli vsan cluster new" and then contribute the storage by adding the SSD device and the respective USB-based disks using the information from the previous step in the ESXi Shell:

esxcli vsan storage add -s t10.ATA_____Corsair_Force_GT________________________12136500000013420576 -d mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 -d mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 -d mpx.vmhba34:C0:T0:L0 -d mpx.vmhba40:C0:T0:L0

If we take a look a the VSAN configurations in the vSphere Web Client, we can see that we now have 4 USB-based disks contributing storage to the VSAN Disk Group. In this particular configuration, I was using my Mac Mini which has 4 x USB 3.0 devices that are connected and providing the "MD" disks and one of the internal drives that has an SSD. Ideally, you would probably want to boot ESXi from a USB device and then claim one of the internal drives along with 3 other USB devices for the most optimal configuration.

As a bonus, there is one other nugget that I discovered while testing out the USB-based disks for VSAN 6.0 which is another hidden option to support iSCSI based disks with VSAN. You will need to enable the option called /VSAN/AllowISCSIDisks using the same method as enabling USB-based disk option. This is not something I have personally tested, so YMMV but I suspect it will allow VSAN to claim an iSCSI device that has been connected to an ESXi host and allow it to contribute to a VSAN Disk Group as another way of providing additional capacity to VSAN with platforms that have restricted number of disk slots. Remember, neither of these solutions should be used beyond home labs and they are not officially supported by VMware, so do not bother trying to do anything fancy or running performance tests, you are just going to let your self down and not see the full potential of VSAN 🙂