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Cool Docker Container for VMware Utilities

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Last week during lunch I learned about a cool little project that my colleague Alan Renouf was working on in his spare time at night. He was interested in learning more about Docker and thought the best way to learn about something new was by using it, which is normally how I learn as well. He came up with a nifty idea to create a Docker Image that would house a bunch of useful VMware tools which included several VMware open source projects as well.

UPDATE (11/23/16) - The Docker Container has now been updated with all the latest vSphere 6.5 SDK/CLI/Tools. We also plan to make this new version of the Docker Image available on Docker Hub, so stay tuned for those details shortly.

Some customers in the past have built similar offerings by using a free VMware Appliance called vMA (vSphere Management Assistance). vMA is nothing more than a stripped down version of SLES that has the vSphere CLI (vCLI) pre-installed. In my opinion, vMA is pretty limited and you can not install additional packages without voiding official support. Even if you decide to ignore support and install custom packages, I have often seen this break existing dependencies. When I talk to customers about their use of vMA, most used it because it was just there, but the majority prefer to use their own harden distribution of Linux and install their own admin utilities and packages which may also include non-VMware tools.

I personally have no problem building my own VM appliance that contains the various VMware packages, utilities and scripts that I use on a daily basis. However, not everyone is comfortable with this idea. Wow could this be further simplified and automated? Well, enter vmware-utils a Docker Image that allows you to automatically build a new image that contains some of the most popular and widely used VMware Utilities.

I wanted to enhance the awesome work that Alan had done with couple more VMware open source tools that I thought might be useful to VMware Administrators, which I actually wrote about here in my List of VMware CLIs, SDKS and DevOps Tools article. I have already submitted a pull request for my changes here. If there are other tools or packages you think that are useful and wish to contribute back, feel free to clone the repository and submit a pull request!

The latest vmware-utils now contains the following:

  • vSphere CLI 6.5
  • PowerCLI Core 1.0
  • vSphere Management SDK 6.5
  • vSphere SDK for Perl 6.5
  • vSphere SDK for Ruby (rbvmomi)
  • vSphere SDK for Python (pyvmomi)
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Ruby 6.5
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Python 6.5
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Perl 6.5
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Java 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Ruby 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Python 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Java 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Perl 6.5
  • Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) 6.5
  • OVFTool 4.2
  • PowerCLI Community Repository
  • PowerCLI Core Docker Container Samples
  • William Lam's vGhetto Script Repository
  • Pyvmomi Community Samples
  • Docker Client v1.12.3
  • Docker Compose v1.8.1

For those of you who are new to Docker, a great way to quickly get started is by using an awesome tool called boot2docker which allows you to run Docker Containers on either a Windows or Mac OS X system. This also helps remove any barriers if you do not want to setup a Linux machine to get Docker of if you are like me, running on Mac OS X and rather not have to spin up a VM just to use Docker. Below are the steps on getting boot2docker working and building your own vmware-utils Docker Image.

Step 1 - Download the Docker Client for your specific OS (Windows, Linux or Mac OS X)

Step 2 - Take a look at the vmware-utils README, I spent some time updating it to make it more consumable for new users of Docker and follow the "How" section which will have you download the 4 VMware utilities as well as the vmware-utils DockerFile which we will need to build the Docker Container.

Step 3 - Create a directory and place all files into that directory. In this example, I have called the directory "vmware-utils".

vmware-utils-docker-container-0
Step 3 - We are now ready to build our vmware-utils Docker Image. Change into the "vmware-utils" directory that contains the files you downloaded earlier we will need to specify a "tag" for our image as part of the build command. In this example, I have called my image "lamw/vmware-utils" and to start the build process run the following command:

docker build -t lamw/vmware-utils .

Step 4 - The build itself may take some time depending on the speed of your internet connection. You will know when it has successfully completed when it states "Successfully built X" where X will be some unique ID as seen in the screenshot below.

vmware-utils-docker-container-4
Step 5 - Once the Docker Image has finished building, you can then run and connect to the Container by running the following command:

docker run --rm -it lamw/vmware-utils

vmware-utils-docker-container-5
At this point, you are now logged into the vmware-utils Docker Container that you have just built! It contains all the VMware Utilities that I have listed earlier and for more details on what has been installed and the location of the utilities, take a look at the vmware-utils Github documentation. If there are other tools you would like to see, feel free to contribute back by cloning the repository and submitting a pull request. I am definitely looking forward to seeing how this project evolves and providing a more dynamic way of creating a vMA-like experience without the current limitations. Keep up the awesome work Alan!

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:

How to quickly deploy new CoreOS Image w/VMware Tools on ESXi?

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deploy-coreos-with-vmware-tools-on-esxi Thanks to a conversation I had this morning with a Twitter user @BOK, I learned that CoreOS has just recently published a new CoreOS Alpha Image (v490.0.0) that now includes the Open VMware Tools package. In addition, the new image also now uses the optimized VMXNET3 network adapter. From our chat, it looks like this update is not available in the insecure or VMware Fusion image and I can only guess that these images may eventually get deprecated or removed completely in favor for the newer VMware image which can both run on ESXi as well as hosted products like VMware Fusion/Workstation.

@BOK also shared with me a modified version of my script that I initially created to automate the deployment of CoreOS onto ESXi. The original workflow had to be slightly modified as the new image is only available as bz2 (bunzip2) and ESXi does not contain the bunzip2 utility. This means there are now two steps: first is to extract the VMDK and upload to ESXi datastore which is going to be done manually and you can run the script which will automatically convert the VMDK to the proper format and register the VM in ESXi.

I was thinking about how I could simplify this process, even though it is just a couple of extra commands, I always like to see how I can make something easier to consume and reducing the complexity if possible. I of course decided to create a new script called deploy_coreos_on_esxi2.sh which now runs outside of the ESXi Shell. The script requires a UNIX/Linux system that has the bunzip2 utility and will automatically download both the VMX and VMDK file, perform the extraction and then upload it to ESXi host using an HTTP API provided through the vSphere Datastore. Lastly, it auto-generates the configuration shell script that will run over SSH to the ESXi host (SSH is still required) which will perform the same set of operations as my previous script did.

Note: You will be prompted to enter the ESXi root password when it tries to run the script remotely on the ESXi Shell, there is a timeout for 120seconds in case you step away from the console.

Prior to running the script, you will need to edit the following 7 variables:

  • ESXi_HOST
  • ESXI_USERNAME
  • ESXI_PASSWORD
  • ESXI_DATASTORE
  • VM_NETWORK
  • VM_NAME

Here is a screenshot of running the script from my Mac OS X desktop:

install-core-os-with-vmware-tools-on-esxi-0
Once the CoreOS VM has fully booted, we can take a look at our vSphere Client and we should see that VMware Tools is in fact running and we can see the IP Address automatically being displayed in the UI:

install-core-os-with-vmware-tools-on-esxi-1
The really nice thing about having VMware Tools running in the CoreOS image, is that you can use VMware's Guest Operations API to be able to perform operations within the guest which are proxied through VMware Tools and can be quite handy, especially if networking is not available or you want to go through a single management interface such as using the vSphere API.