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How to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 8.0 to VMware Fusion or Workstation?

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VMware Fusion and Workstation continues to be another popular way for customers to run a VMware Homelab while leveraging a users existing desktop. In the early days of vSphere 6.5, the method to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) to Fusion/Workstation was less than ideal with a lot of manual steps. In 2017, the Fusion/Workstation team introduced native OVF support and that made deploying the VCSA much simpler, especially with the VCSA two stage installer.

Even though this is not an officially supported method from VMware for deploying the VCSA, the process has not changed for the last several releases and it just works which was great for our users. With vSphere 8, it looks like there has been a change to the VCSA installer that causes a failure during the Stage 2 configuration.


I was made aware of this issue from a colleague who was looking to setup a vSphere 8 environment using VMware Workstation.

Taking a look at the log file, he noticed the error was regarding the upgrade.import.directory OVF property not being set, which seems to be causing the issue.

# cat /var/log/firstboot/vlcm_firstboot.py_9117_stderr.log
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/vmware-vlcm/firstboot/vlcm_firstboot.py", line 167, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/lib/vmware-vlcm/firstboot/vlcm_firstboot.py", line 129, in main
    fb = VlcmFirstboot(VLCM_COMP, VLCM_SOLUSERNAME)
  File "/usr/lib/vmware-vlcm/firstboot/vlcm_firstboot.py", line 50, in __init__
    os.path.join(get_install_parameter('upgrade.import.directory'), "vlcm")
  File "/usr/lib/vmware/site-packages/cis/tools.py", line 88, in get_install_parameter
    raise InstallParameterException('Install-parameter %s not set' % param)
cis.exceptions.InstallParameterException: {
    "detail": [
        {
            "id": "install.ciscommon.internal.error",
            "translatable": "Encountered an internal error.\n\n%(0)s",
            "args": [
                "Install-parameter upgrade.import.directory not set"
            ],
            "localized": "Encountered an internal error.\n\nInstall-parameter upgrade.import.directory not set"
        }
    ],
    "componentKey": null,
    "problemId": null,
    "resolution": {
        "id": "install.default.failure.resolution",
        "translatable": "This is an unrecoverable error, please retry install. If you encounter this error again, please search for these symptoms in the VMware Knowledge Base for any known issues and possible resolutions. If none can be found, collect a support bundle and open a support request.",
        "localized": "This is an unrecoverable error, please retry install. If you encounter this error again, please search for these symptoms in the VMware Knowledge Base for any known issues and possible resolutions. If none can be found, collect a support bundle and open a support request."
    }
}

Using one of my previous blog post for guidance, he discovered a quick workaround to the problem by simply ensuring this variable is configured with a default value. After running into the problem myself and verifying the solution, I figure this might be useful for anyone looking to run vSphere 8 using VMware Fusion or Workstation, so here are the instructions to work around this issue.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk
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Automating the deployment of Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu

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I recently wrote about our Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu solution and how it can really benefit IT Admins, beyond just the App Modernization use case which it was primarily designed for. App Transformer is provided as a Virtual Appliance (OVA) and the deployment using the vSphere UI is very straight forward. In this blog post, we will focus on automating the deployment of the App Transformer OVA.

To demonstrate the automation, I have created two example scripts, one that uses PowerCLI and the other using OVFTool. Both scripts contain the exact same variable names that will need to be updated by customers based on their environment. You can find the description for each variable blow covering both the appliance and application settings.

App Transformer Appliance Settings

  • AT_IP - IP Addres
  • AT_NETMASK - Netmask
  • AT_GATEWAY - Gateway
  • AT_DNS - DNS Server
  • AT_DNS_DOMAIN - DNS Search Domain
  • AT_DNS_SEARCH - DNS Search Path
  • AT_NTP - NTP Server
  • AT_ROOT_PASSWORD - Password for root (requires a minimum of 12 characters)

App Transformer Application Settings:

  • AT_USERNAME - Username to login to App Transformer UI
  • AT_PASSWORD - Password to login to App Transformer UI (requires a minimum of 12 characters)
  • AT_ENCRYPTION_PASSWORD - Password used to encrypt the database
  • AT_INSTALL_EMBEDDED_HARBOR - Install Embedded Harbor registry, useful for proof of concept/testing purposes

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How to create a custom Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Node OVA based on Photon OS Real Time Kernel?

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One really cool feature of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) is the ability to bring your custom images (BYOI) which can then be used to deploy TKG Workload Clusters. To do so, customers will need to use Kubernetes (K8s) Image Builder tool to author new OVA images and then make TKG aware by updating the Tanzu Kubernetes Release (TKR) Build of Materials (BOM) configuration.

I had played around with Image Builder awhile back during the TKG 1.2 release and it definitely was not very easy to use. I have been meaning to kick the tires on Image Builder again as I know with the latest 1.3.x release, there have been a number of improvements. This week I saw an inquiry from my buddy Alan Renouf who was looking to see if there was a way to use the new Photon OS Real Time Kernel as a base image for a K8s-based application that he was working with that had requirements for the real time kernel.

Interestingly enough, there was another inquiry with a similiar customer request for their edge deployment and I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out Image Builder again, which has been overhauled and the build process can be completely consumed as a Docker container, which definitely made things much easier than before. I also had never played with real time version of Photon OS, so this gave me a reason to try that out which was initially introduced with Photon OS 4.0 but it also looks like real time kernel was added to 3.0 recently, which is the version I had used to test.

Note: vSphere with Tanzu currently does not support the ability to bring your own image like TKG, I know this is something that has been asked about and is being considered in the future.

The BYOI process for TKG is comprised of two steps:

  • Create Custom TKG OVA
  • Update TKG with new TKR BOM

Although there are detailed documentation for this process, I still ran into a number of issues which I think the documentation could be improved with a complete working example rather than using generic values which lead to some interpretation, which I did not interpret correctly the first time through. After posting some questions in the Image Builder Slack Channel, I was able to finally connect the dots with the help from Scott Rosenberg, who I also knew, as a customer of our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. Putting everything together, I figure it would be useful to document the process I took and hopefully this can benefit other customers looking to build and consume their own OVA images with TKG.

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