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Native OVF support for Fusion/Workstation 2017 Tech Preview 

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The VMware Fusion and Workstation team just released their 2017 Tech Preview releases and there is a ton of new and awesome capabilities which you can read more about here and here. One of the exciting new features, which I was very fortunate to have been involved with is finally here, native OVF property support! Although customers have had the ability to import OVF/OVAs for some time now, if they included OVF properties, they would be ignored and often times this would result in a failed deployment as those properties are required for the initial setup.

A great example of this is trying to run the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) on either Fusion or Workstation. Today, the only workaround is to manually edit the VMX file and supplying the correct OVF properties which I have blogged about here. With the latest TP release of Fusion/Workstation, when you import an OVF/OVA that contains OVF properties, the UI will automatically render the required information directly into the UI without needing users to manually touch the VMX files.

Here is a screenshot of deploying the latest VCSA 6.5d OVA (jump to bottom for some additional VCSA tidbits when deploying to Fusion/Workstation):

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Using vSphere Guest Operations API on macOS Guests? 

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I have written a number of articles exploring the usage and some of the cool tricks that the vSphere Guest Operations (GuestOps) feature provides which you can be found here, here, here and here. I have been a huge fan and supporter of GuestOps since the early days where it was formally known as the VIX API. Having used GuestOps across many different GuestOS types including Nested ESXi, I have to admit, I had never tried it against an Apple macOS guests. I recently had a customer reach out who was looking to use the GuestOps API via PowerCLI (Invoke-VMScript) to automate updates against his guestOS templates that span across Windows, Linux and macOS (from 10.7 to latest). The customer was able to get all guestOSes working except for macOS.

Since I had never tried this before, I spun up my Apple Mac Mini which happen to have a macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) guests running. I tried using the vSphere API GuestOps directly to see if this was a PowerCLI and/or API issue. I too ran into issues and after enabling VMware Tools debugging on the guests (which you can find more details below), I found that it hit the following error:

[Jun 28 06:35:42.805] [   debug] [vix] >VixToolsImpersonateUser
[Jun 28 06:35:42.925] [ warning] [vmsvc] Failed to set gid for user root

Reaching out to Engineering regarding the problem, I came to learn that this particular issue was due to a syscall change made by Apple starting with macOS 10.10.3 and newer. Although the change was a positive thing from a security standpoint, it did break the GuestOps functionality. The good news was that this was already resolved with VMware Tools 10.1 or later. When I had initially provisioned the macOS guests, the latest VMware Tools at the time was 9.10.5. After I applied the latest version which is currently 10.1.7, the issue went away and I was able to successfully use the GuestOps API on my macOS guests.

Below are examples of running the system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType command using both the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet as well as the vSphere API and PowerCLI to consume the GuestOps APIs. Both approaches delivers the exact same outcome, the one benefit of using Invoke-VMScript is that if you want to easily return output from a given command, the cmdlet already does the heavy lifting. If you notice in the native vSphere API case, you do not get output but rather just the PID ID. If you want to return the output, you need to first save it into a file and then download the file to your client system, which may not be ideal for interactive usage but it all depends on your use case.

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Using vSphere Auto Deploy to Netboot ESXi onto Apple Mac Hardware

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Last week I published an article that demonstrated for the first time on how to netboot an ESXi installation onto Apple Mac Hardware. As you can imagine, this was very exciting news for our VMware/Apple customers, who historically have not had this capability before. Customers can now automate and install ESXi over the network onto their Apple Mac Hardware just like you would for other non-Apple hardware.

With the ability to boot ESXi over the network for Apple Mac Hardware, it is now also possible for customers to take advantage of the vSphere Auto Deploy feature. Auto Deploy allows customers to easily and quickly provision ESXi hosts at scale and integrates directly with vCenter Server to automatically join and apply specific defined host configuration policies. This is a great time to check out Auto Deploy, especially with all the new enhancements that were introduced in vSphere 6.5 like custom script bundles for example.

Below are the instructions on how to setup Auto Deploy to work with Apple Mac Hardware.

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