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How to configure the vCenter Extension vService using ovftool?

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A really neat capability that is available in some of VMware's Virtual Appliance is a feature called vCenter Extension vService which leverages the vCenter Solutions Manager and vServices SDK. This feature allows a virtual appliance solution to automatically register itself as an extension with vCenter Server without requiring user to provide vCenter Server connection information and thus simplifying the deployment of a virtual appliance based solution. Some examples of VMware Virtual Appliances that can advantage of this feature are vSphere Replication and vSphere Infrastructure Navigator. If you have deployed either of these solutions, you may have seen a screenshot like the one shown below.

vCenter-extension-installation-vService-0
When going through the vSphere C#/Web Client to deploy a virtual appliance that requires vCenter Extension vService, the process is quite simple. You simply click on the drop down menu and select the one and only option as seen in the screenshot above. However, if you are looking to automate the virtual appliance deployment using something like ovftool, you might be asking how do you go about configuring this parameter? This was actually a recent question that I received on an older blog post regarding the automated deployment of vSphere Infrastructure Navigator.

The good news is that ovftool provides a way to configure the vCenter Extension vService using an option called --vService and expected syntax is the following:

--vService:<dependencyId>=<providerId>

To find the dependencyId, you will need to inspect the virtual appliance OVF/OVA. You can simply do this by running ovftool and passing in the OVF/OVA as input. Using the latest vSphere Infrastructure Navigator 5.8 OVA, the dependencyId is simply named "installation" as seen in the VService Dependency section in the screenshot below.

vCenter-extension-installation-vService-1
The providerId refers to the vCenter Server and from what I can tell, this statically defined as com.vmware.vim.vsm:extension_vservice

Putting all this together, if you wish to configure the vService, you will need to pass in the following option to the ovftool:

--vService:installation=com.vmware.vim.vsm:extension_vservice

Quick Tip - Handy ovftool 4.0 advanced options

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I recently had a need to deploy an OVA using ovftool on a Windows desktop and I ran into the following error:

Error: Could not lookup host: root

Since the environment I was deploying to did not have DNS, the failed hostname lookup was expected. This was pretty annoying with previous releases of ovftool but it looks like with the latest 4.0 version, there is a new advanced option called --X:disableHostnameResolve that would allow you to disable this check. Using the new version of ovftool and the advanced option, I was able to bypass the check and deploy the OVA.

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Quick Tip - Useful ovftool debugging options

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This morning I needed perform several OVF uploads using ovftool and provide that information to engineering to investigate some performance issues. I tend to error on the side of providing more information than requested. The ovftool provides some really useful debugging options that are really handy in these situations but are un-documented. I can never seem to remember the exact syntax and hence I am documenting them here. I will also file a documentation bug to ensure these get added 🙂

UPDATE (08/19/13) - Thanks to one of the OVF engineers, it turns out you can see all the debug options and their definitions by running ovftool --help debug

The two options that I am referring to are:

--X:logFile=
--X:logLevel=

The first option allows you to log the entire ovftool session to a file which you can then send off to someone and the second option allows you to control the verbosity of the logs which I normally set to use verbose.

Here is an example of how you would use these ovftool options:

/Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/ovftool --X:logFile=upload.log --X:logLevel=verbose -ds=mini-local-datastore-2 '--net:Network 1=VM Network' VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.1.0.10200-1235310_OVF10.ova vi://root@mini

Once the ovftool has completed its operation, you can take a look at the log and you will see quite a bit of information including some additional ovftool options that can be specified on the command-line which start with /X:

--> /X:httpTimeout = "0"
--> /X:imageReadSize = "262144"
--> /X:logFile = "upload.log"
--> /X:logLevel = "verbose"
--> /X:maxNumberOfTermSignals = "5"
--> /X:maxRedirects = "256"
--> /X:maximalDeltaConfSize = "8"
--> /X:maximalDeltaTreeSize = "6"
--> /X:progressSmoothing = "60"
--> /X:useMacNaming = "true"
--> /X:vCloudEnableGuestCustomization = "false"
--> /X:vCloudKeepTemplate = "true"
--> /X:vCloudTimeout = "3600"
--> /X:vimSessionTimeout = "600"

Note: I would not recommend tweaking the other options as the defaults should be sufficient, but logging to a file or upping the verbosity can be useful for troubleshooting