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pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) 5.5.0-2014.1 released!

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I just saw an awesome update from Shawn Hartsock, a fellow VMware colleague. For those of you who do not know him, Shawn works in our Ecosystems and Solutions Engineering (EASE) organization and is the primary maintainer of VMware's pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) open-source project. The pyvmomi project was open sourced since last December which I had written about here, it has received over 3K+ downloads and has a very active community. Much of this success has been due to the hard from Shawn fostering an active community around pyvmomi.

The announcement today from Shawn is a new release of pyvmomi at version 5.5.0-2014.1:

As mentioned earlier, the pyvmomi project is a very active project and Shawn is constantly engaging with users looking for feedback, suggestions or requests for new samples to build. If you are interested in vSphere Automation and would like to leverage Python, be sure to check out the pyvmomi Github repository! Lastly, if you have written some cool scripts/applications or would like to request specific sample scripts, be sure to send a pull request to Shawn as we would love to see more contributions and collaborations from the community!

How to bootstrap Horizon View 5.3.1 onto a VSAN Datastore using VCT

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As some of you may have heard, vSphere 5.5 Update 1 including the much anticipated  VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) was released earlier this week. To take advantage of this new vSphere release, other VMware solutions were also updated including the latest Horizon View 5.3.1 which now supports VSAN. Having spent some time playing around with the recent VMware Fling VCT which I have written about here and here, I thought why not give the latest version a try? I really like the simplicity of the VCT appliance which allows you to easily deploy an entire Horizon View environment from scratch and it just requires a stand-alone ESXi host not managed by vCenter Server and a Window 2008 ISO. Out of the box, VCT only supports vSphere 5.5 and Horizon View 5.3, but you can easily tweak either the HTML pages or modify the POST request to deploy the latest version of VCSA and Horizon View/Composer.

horizon-view-bootstrap-vsan
Since Horizon View 5.3.1 supports VSAN, I thought it would be neat to be able to "bootstrap" the entire Horizon View environment onto a VSAN datastore which would allow you to consume all the underlying physical disks without having to resort to a "temporary" VMFS volume to deploy the additional infrastructure. Now of course, this assumes you have no existing infrastructure or if you want to quickly spin up a POC or testing environment for View. The diagram above illustrates what the environment will look like at the end.

Below are the instructions for leveraging VCT to automate the deployment of vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 Update 1 and Horizon View 5.3.1

Step 1 - Install ESXi 5.5 Update 1 on your physical ESXi host or even virtual (which is how I tested this configuration)

Step 2 - Configure VSAN datastore on your single ESXi node using the "bootstrap" instructions here

Step 2 - Download VMware VCT & Studio and follow the optimized deployment here and deploy onto the VSAN datastore in previous step

Step 3 - Download VCSA 5.5 Update 1 & Horizon View 5.3.1, download links can be found here

Step 4 - Upload the three files to the VCT appliance via SCP and store them in /installers directory

horizon-view-on-vsan-0
Step 5 - If you plan on automating the Horizon View deployment from the command line, you will need the automateVCT.sh script and modify the following variables so they look like the following:

VIEW_SERVER_BIN=VMware-viewconnectionserver-x86_64-5.3.1-1634134.exe
VIEW_COMPOSER_BIN=VMware-viewcomposer-5.3.1-1634135.exe
VCSA_OVA=VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.5.0.10000-1624811_OVF10.ova

If you plan on using the VCT UI to deploy your Horizon View environment, then you will need to edit the following HTML files and either append or replace the VCSA OVA / View filenames

/apache-tomcat-7.0.27/webapps/vct/existing.html
/apache-tomcat-7.0.27/webapps/vct/new.html

horizon-view-on-vsan-1
Once the files have been uploaded, you will then be able to run through VCT as you normally would and in an hour or so, you should have a fully deployed VCSA 5.5 Update 1 and Horizon View 5.3.1 environment up and running on top of a VSAN datastore.

horizon-view-on-vsan-2
Once your initial ESXi host is configured, you can then deploy your other ESXi hosts and add them to your VSAN Cluster. Remember, you should have at least a minimum of 3 nodes with a recommendation of 4 as pointed out by Duncan Epping in his blog article here. From what I can tell, VCT had no issues provisioning VCSA 5.5 Update 1, there were no major changes and the same goes for Horizon View 5.3.1. I was even able to add in my vCenter Server to ensure basic View functionality was working.

horizon-view-on-vsan-3
I think this is a great way if you want to quickly setup a vSphere 5.5 Update 1 environment and evaluate the latest Horizon View 5.3.1 release. I also came across this Horizon View 5.3.1 on VMware Virtual SAN - Quick Start Guide KB that will also come in handy if you are looking to use Horizon View with VSAN.

Automating Horizon View deployments using VCT & cURL

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Last week I spent a couple of days playing around with the new Horizon View Configuration Tool (VCT) Fling and as part of my "exploration" of VCT, I needed to re-run the deployment. Going through the guided wizard the first time was fine, but if you needed to do that 5-10 times, then it was not very fun. Since VCT was a simple web application, I decided to fire up one of my favorite tool, Firebug to do some poking around.

automating-vct-0
It turns out the payload request was actually very simple and it contains all the variables for each of the parameters that a user would specify through the UI and a single HTTP POST request is then sent to the web application for deployment. I took all the variables and created a simple shell script that a user can easily edit without having to worry about fat-fingering on the UI as there is no form validation at the moment and then send the POST request using my other favorite tool cURL.

Disclaimer:  These scripts are provided for informational and educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

You can download the script here called automateVCT.sh

Before running the script, you will need to edit the variables for your environment and if you have an existing Active Directory server, then there are some variables that you can leave off. Towards the bottom of the script, there is an infinite loop that will run to continuously to check the current status which is then printed on the screen every 10 seconds. For practical use, you will probably want to change the timing to something a bit longer like every 5 minutes for a status.

Here is an example of executing the script:
automating-vct-1
As you can see from the screenshot, once the request has been accepted by VCT, the status will be printed on the screen which is the same status shown in the UI. If everything was successful, you should eventually see the status display the IP Address of your Horizon View environment like the following:

automating-vct-2
This script really came in handy for testing VCT and I thought it would be great to share it with the community so you can automate the deployment of your Horizon View environment using VCT!