Search Results for: ovftool

Automating VCSA Network Configurations For Greenfield Deployments

02.17.2013 by William Lam // 6 Comments

If you deploy the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) or other virtual appliances directly onto an ESXi host,
you will notice the network configuration wizard for the virtual appliance is not available as you would expect when deploying to a vCenter Server.

The reason for this is that ESXi does not support some of the advanced OVF/OVA properties such as the Networking section and you will need to deploy the OVF/OVA to a vCenter Server to be able to configure these advanced options. This poses a problem if you need to deploy the VCSA in a greenfield environment where you will not have an existing vCenter Server running and you will be deploying directly to the ESXi host. Unless you have a DHCP enabled network, you will most likely need to manually go into the vSphere C# Client to change the network configuration as it was unable to obtain an IP Address.

Though this is a one time configuration, it is still not ideal and would require the use of a Windows system to access the vSphere C# Client. You can actually get around this by leveraging the GuestOperations API (previously known as VIX API) which allows you to perform operations within the guestOS that is running VMware Tools. The other nice thing about the GuestOperations API is that it does not require any network connectivity from the virtual machine.

Note: The GuestOperations API can be accessed in variety of ways and in this article I am demonstrating just two methods and does not require a Windows system. You can also access the GuestOperations API using PowerCLI if you are more comfortable with Windows and do not wish to use the vSphere C# Client to manually configure the network settings for the VCSA. I would also like to stress that though this article is about the VCSA, you can easily apply this to any VMware based virtual appliance or virtual appliance running VMware Tools.

The most important thing to identity before using the GuestOperations API is the specific command or program you wish to invoke and the argument it accepts. To configure the network configuration for the VCSA or any other VMware based virtual appliance, you would use /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_network If you just run this command by itself, there are variety of options from IPv4 to IPv6, static or dhcp configuration. In our example, we will be configuring a Static IPv4 address for our VCSA and the command we would run is the following:

/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_network "eth0 STATICV4 192.168.1.150 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1"

Method 1 - Using RVC (Ruby vSphere Console)

RVC is a nice open-source tool for interactively managing and configuring your vSphere infrastructure. RVC can be installed on any platform, in this example, I am running RVC on my Apple OS X laptop.

Step 1 - We first need to deploy the VCSA OVA and we can do so by using the ovftool via the command-line which can also be installed on Mac OS X system.

Step 2 - We then login to our ESXi host using RVC.

Step 3 - Next we will need to "change directory" to the location of our VM, in this example my VCSA is called VCSA-5.1. We can then run the "info ." command to view the summary of our VM. We can see that our VM is powered on from our initial deployment and we are ready to apply our network configurations in the next step.

Step 4 - To be able to run the above command, we will need to first authenticate into the guestOS. To do so, we will run the "vm_guest.authenticate ." and we will be prompted for the VCSA password. By default, the command assumes the username is root but that can also be specified on the command-line. If you are successful, you should not see any errors and then we can run the "vm_guest.start_program" command. Run the following to set a IPv4 static IP Address:

vm_guest.start_program . --program-path /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_network --arguments "eth0 STATICV4 192.168.1.150 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1"

Note: All commands in RVC can be tabbed out with auto-completion.

If the command was successful, you can quit RVC and you should be able to ping the IP Address that you have just configured.

Method 2 - Using vSphere SDK for Perl Script

Awhile back I wrote a script called guestOperations.pl which is a vSphere SDK for Perl script that implements the new GuestOperations API. This is a generic script which can be used to remotely connect to either a vCenter Server or ESXi host and perform operations within a guestOS as long as VMware Tools is installed and running. In this example, I also have the vSphere SDK for Perl installed on my Mac OS X laptop, but you can also install this SDK on any platform as well.

Step 1 - We will first use the "validate" operation to ensure our credentials to the guestOS is correct, but more importantly ensure that VMware Tools is up and running.

If the operation was successful, we should see our guest credentials validated. If not, you may need to wait a minute or two while VMware Tools is still loading up.

Step 2 - To invoke the command to configure the network configuration, we will use the "startprog" operation and run the following:

./guestOpsManagement.pl --server mini --username root --guestusername root --vm VCSA-5.1 --operation startprog --program_path /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_network --program_args "eth0 STATICV4 192.168.1.150 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1" --working_dir /

If the command was successful, then you should now be able to ping the IP Address that you have just configured.

As you can see, with the use of the GuestOperations API, you can do more than just setup the network configuration for a VM, you can run pretty much any command within the guestOS as you normally would if you were to RDP or SSH in. This is a very powerful interface that you can leverage to help you automate your virtual machine deployment and configurations!

Lossless OVF Export in vSphere 5.1 & vCloud Director 5.1

09.27.2012 by William Lam // 5 Comments

Did you know in vSphere 5.1, the new vSphere Web Client now provides a lossless OVF export feature for virtual machines? Previous to this, when you exported a virtual machine only the basic configurations were captured to ensure the virtual machine could be re-imported into another environment that supports OVF. The virtual machine's "virtual hardware personality" such as the BIOS UUID, MAC addresses, VMware specific advanced settings (Extra Configurations), boot order, PCI slot numbers, etc. were not captured as part of the export.

One of the main reasons for doing this is to ensure greater portability of the virtual machine across different environments. By having some of these specific properties tied to the virtual machine, it could limit where a virtual machine could be imported to. However, if you wish to preserve some of these settings during an export, you now have a new advanced option in vSphere 5.1 to specify additional configurations to capture for an OVF export.

When you select the "Enable advanced options" box, you will be provided with a list of configurations that you can preserve and export with the virtual machine.

Note: As the warning message states, only enable the configurations that you absolutely need, else you should stick to the defaults to ensure you have the best portability for your virtual machine export.

There is also a similar feature in vCloud Director 5.1 for vAppTemplates. When you initiate a download of a vAppTemplate, you now have an additional check box to "Preserve identity information" of the vAppTemplate prior to export. This is just a single check box for vCloud Director, you can not specify which configurations you want to preserve.

All these new OVF features can also be accessed with the latest ovftool 3.0.1 release which includes several new enhancements as well as support for both vSphere 5.1 and vCloud Director 5.1. You can find more details in the ovftool 3.0.1 user guide, but here is a summary of what's new in this release.

What Is New in OVF Tool 3.0.1

Support for vSphere 5.1 and 5.0.
Support for vCloud Director 5.1, 1.5, and partial support for vCloud Director 1.0
The following new ovftool options: --annotation, --exportFlags, --shaAlgorithm, --sourcePEM, --targetPEM, --vCloudTemplate, --sourceSSLThumbprint, --targetSSLThumbprint, --fencedMode, --noSSLVerify, --vService.

Feature Highlights

Full support for vCloud Director 1.5 and 5.1
Includes full OVF 1.0, and 1.1 support and backward-compatible mode for importing existing OVF 0.9 packages
Supports both import and generation of OVA packages (OVA is part of the OVF standard, and contains all the files of a virtual machine or vApp in a single file.)
Directly converts between any vSphere, vCloud Director, VMX, or OVF source format to any vSphere, vCloud Director, VMX, or OVF target format
Accesses OVF sources using HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP, or from a local file
Deploys and exports vApp configurations on vSphere 4.0 targets and later and on vCloud Director 1.5 targets and later
Provides options to power on a VM or vApp after deployment, and to power off a virtual machine or vApp before exporting (caution advised)
Show information about the content of any source in probe mode
Provides context sensitive error messages for vSphere and vCloud Director sources andtargets, showing possible completions for common errors, such as an incomplete vCenter inventory path or missing datastore and network mappings
Provides an optional output format to support scripting when another program calls OVFTool
Uses new optimized upload and download API (optimized for vSphere 4.0 and later)
Signs OVF packages and validates OVF package signatures
Validates XML Schema of OVF 1.0 and OVF 1.1 descriptors
Import and export of OVF packages into a vApprun1.0 workspace. For more information about vApprun, see http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vapprun.

How to Copy VMs Directly Between ESXi Hosts Without Shared Storage

06.22.2012 by William Lam // 93 Comments

There were some discussions earlier this week about copying Virtual Machines from one ESXi host to another ESXi host that reminded me of a very cool feature in the ovftool that could help with this task(which I thought I had written about already). As you probably have guessed by now, I am a big fan of the ovftool and have written several articles here, here and here. It still surprises me with the amount of features this little utility contains and this particular one is definitely a cool one!

If you have ever needed to copy a Virtual Machine from one host to another, it can be a challenge sometimes, especially if you do not have shared storage. You can of course leverage tools like VMware Converter or exporting the VM to a "middle man" system and then re-importing that VM into the destination host but it could take awhile or you have to run a Windows system. Well, if you are looking for a quick and easy way to copy a VM from one host to another, try using the ovftool.

In this example, I have two ESXi hosts called vESXi-03 and vESXi-04 and they both contain a single local datastore (no shared storage). I have a VM called vMA5 that is located on vESXi-03 and I would like to copy that directly to vESXi-04 without needing any additional storage.

Here is an example of using ovftool to probe the ESXi host to see the list of available VMs:

Note: A VM must be powered off for ovftool to transfered or exported.

Now that we have identified our VM, we just need to specify the source ESXi host and the destination ESXi host as well as the datastore using the -ds option. Here is an example of using ovftool to export the VM from one ESXi host to another ESXi host:

There are also other options that you can specify such as the network configuration and power options, please refer to the ovftool documentation for more details.

If you open up a vSphere Client connection to each of your ESXi hosts, you will see that the source host will have an export task and the destination host will have an import task as shown in the screenshot below:

Pretty nifty huh? 🙂

If anyone is interested in how this works, the system that is running ovftool acts as a proxy between your source and destination. The system running ovftool IS in the data path during the transfer but its only for the data to stream from source->client->destination. Nothing is stored on the client system and you do not need to have the storage capacity of what you are transferring. This is very nifty little feature that many people are not aware of with ovftool.