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Ultimate automation guide to deploying VCSA 6.0 Part 0

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With vSphere 6.0, there is a new deployment model for vCenter Server which is comprised of following two core components:

  • Platform Services Controller (PSC) Node - Provides VMware Infrastructure services such as vCenter Single Sign-On, vSphere Licensing and VMware Certificate Authority Management (VCMA)
  • vCenter Server Management Node - Provides vCenter Server Service, Inventory Service, vSphere Web Client, vPostgres DB, vSphere Syslog Collector, vSphere Auto Deploy, and vSphere Dump Collector Services

From these two components, there are three deployment types (also shown in the diagrams below):

  1. Embedded Node - Both the Platform Services Controller and vCenter Server Management Node reside on a single system, this is true for both the Windows vCenter Server and the VCSA
  2. External Platform Services Controller Node - You can deploy multiple PSC's and configure them with independent SSO Domains or have them all joined to a single SSO Domain, replicating between each other
  3. vCenter Server Management Node - This requires that you have deployed an external PSC which the vCenter Server can point to

vcsa-6.0-deployment-options-new-2There are currently two supported methods of deploying the VCSA 6.0 Appliance which is using the new HTML based UI (Supported only on Windows) or a new scripted installer method (supports Windows, Mac & Linux). Both of these methods today require direct access to an ESXi host for deployment, which may not work for everyone. What if you want to deploy the new VCSA 6.0 using an existing vCenter Server or running it on top of VMware Fusion or Workstation? Luckily, I spent quite a bit of time going through all these "alternative" deployment methods and documenting the process so that you have a choice on how you would like to test and evaluate vSphere 6 and the new VCSA in your environment.

These alternative methods will be using the VCSA OVA which is actually included in the VCSA ISO. You will need to extract the contents of the VCSA ISO and you can find the OVA in the following path after extraction: VMware-VCSA-all-6.0.0-2562643->vcsa->vmware-vcsa where vmware-vcsa is the VCSA OVA file. Depending on the deployment method you are using, you may only need to just extract the contents of the ISO or possibly rename the vmware-vcsa with .ova extension to deploy. Please refer to the articles below for more details.

Disclaimer: Though these alternative deployment options work, they are however not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.

In the upcoming days, I will be sharing a 4-part blog series for automating the deployment of the new VCSA 6.0 with the following deployment options:

In each article, I will provide resources on how to deploy to an existing vCenter Server or directly to an ESXi host using ovftool via a shell script as well using PowerCLI, deploying to VMware Fusion and deploying to VMware Workstation. Stay tune for Part 1 ...

CoreOS is now available as OVA in Alpha channel

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It looks like the folks over at CoreOS have now also produced an OVA image which can be easily imported into a vSphere or even vCloud Air environment. Previously, it took a few addition steps to convert the "hosted" disk image originally meant for VMware Fusion/Workstation to properly work in a vSphere/vCloud Air based environment. The CoreOS OVA is currently only available in the CoreOS Alpha channel for the "Production" image which also includes VMware's open-vm-tools and the latest release as of today is CoreOS 554.0.0.

You can using either the vSphere C# or vSphere Web Client to import the OVA or you can automate this simply by using command-line via ovftool. Here's an example snippet that you can run directly against an ESXi host:

/Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/ovftool \
        --name=CoreOS \
        "--net:VM Network=VM Network" \
        --datastore=mini-local-datastore-2 \
        --diskMode=thin \
        'http://alpha.release.core-os.net/amd64-usr/554.0.0/coreos_production_vmware_ova.ova' \
        'vi://root:*protected email*'

You can also import the CoreOS OVA into vCloud Air's but you will need to connect into the vCloud Director interface to upload or you can also use ovftool. For more details on how to import using ovftool, check out their documentation here.

Here's a screenshot of deploying CoreOS from a vCloud Air Catalog:

Screen Shot 2015-01-08 at 8.39.48 AM
The "Production" CoreOS image does not contain insecure SSH keys as the "insecure" image and so you will still need to create a Cloud Config ISO if you wish to further customize the image including login credentials. You can take a look at the script I had created for deploying CoreOS from the Stable channel and for more details check out the Cloud Config documentation as well.

List of VMware CLIs, SDKs & DevOps Tools

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A frequent question that I get asked from customers and new developers that are looking to get started with VMware Automation is what CLIs (command-line interfaces) or SDKs (programing/scripting specific languages) are available for them to use? I know it is not always easy to find out what is available on the VMware.com website and some times I even have trouble browsing for all the right information as it is located in many different places. I figure it would be helpful not only for myself but also for others if I put together a list of the various VMware CLIs, SDKs and even some of the new DevOps Tools that VMware has been working on that are available to our customers/developers and partners. I have also included a couple of community tools that I think are pretty interesting. If there are others that you think I should add to the list, feel free and leave a comment.

Note: This is by no means a comprehensive list of every single VMware product/toolkit as there are many many more, including gated SDKs specifically for our partner eco-system. For more details on those API/SDKs, be sure to check out the VMware Developer Center.

UPDATE (4/20) - VMware now has an Open Source page on Github http://vmware.github.io/

VMware Cloud Native Apps:

VMware DevOps Tools:

vCloud Air:

vCloud Director:

vSphere:

vRealize Management Suite:

VMware Community Tools: