WilliamLam.com

How to retrieve the default VM hardware configuration for a specific Guest OS in vSphere?

by // Leave a Comment

Have you ever wondered how or where the vSphere UI generates the default Virtual Machine hardware configuration after selecting a specific Guest OS during the VM creation wizard?


The answer is simply by asking the vSphere platform 🙂 and of course this is provided as an API for any client to consume including our own vSphere UI.

This is a topic I had written about back in 2013 here and here, which demonstrates how to use the EnvironmentBrowser API to query for the list of supported Guest OS and Virtual Hardware Compatibility. In addition to this information, we can also ask the vSphere platform on what are the default hardware configuration for all supported Guest OS using the QueryConfigOption API.

[Read more...]

VMware has the best platform to run latest Windows 10 Desktop, Server & Hyper-V Tech Preview!

by // 6 Comments

I am constantly amazed at the number of guest operating systems that is supported on VMware products like VMware vSphere our Enterprise Hypervisor, vCloud Air our public cloud offering which runs on vSphere and our desktop products such as VMware Fusion and Workstation. If we just look at vSphere alone, it currently "lists" 101 supported guest operating systems! (full list below) However, this is actually a tiny subset of what is actually supported on vSphere as new guest OSes are constantly being added to the support matrix. This also does not include any pre-released operating systems like the recent Apple OS X Yosemite (10.10) Tech Preview. Heck, you can even run Windows 3.11 if you really want to as shown by my fellow VMware colleague Chris Colotti.

To get the complete list of currently supported operating systems for vSphere or any other VMware products, you will want to check the VMware HCL for Guest Operating Systems. Running a filter on latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 release for all Guest OSes, we can see that the total number of supported Guest OSes is astounding 231! I know this number is even greater as we probably can not capture every single x86 Guest OS that exists out there today which can run on VMware.

Getting back to the topic of this post, I know Microsoft has recently released a new Tech Preview of their upcoming Windows platform dubbed Windows 10 (not a typo, they decided to skip Windows 9) and I know some of you may be interested in trying out their latest release. What better way than to run it on VMware? I know there was a blog or two about running Windows 10 on vSphere, however there was some incorrect information about not being able to install VMware Tools or getting the optimized VMXNET3 driver working. I decided to run all three flavors (Windows 10 Desktop, Server and Hyper-V) on the latest vSphere 5.5 release (should work on previous releases of 5.5) and will share the Virtual Machine configuration.

Note: You can also run Windows 10 Tech Preview on both VMware Fusion and Workstation, take a look at this article for more details. These are great options in addition to vSphere and vCloud Air.

Windows 10 Desktop:

  • GuestOS: Windows 8 64-bit
  • Virtual HW: vHW10
  • Network Driver: VMXNET3
  • Storage Controller: LSI Logic SAS

windows10-desktop

Windows 10 Server:

  • GuestOS: Windows 2012 64-bit
  • Virtual HW: vHW10
  • Network Driver: VMXNET3
  • Storage Controller: LSI Logic SAS

windows10-server

Windows 10 Hyper-v:

  • GuestOS: Windows 2012 64-bit
  • Virtual HW: vHW10
  • Network Driver: VMXNET3
  • Storage Controller: LSI Logic SAS
  • CPU Advanced Setting: Enable VHV
  • VM Advanced Setting: hypervisor.cpuid.v0

For more details about running Hyper-V and the last two advanced settings, please take a look at this article on running other Hypervisors.

windows10-hyper-v
If you look closely at this last screenshot, you will see that I am not only running Windows 10 Hyper-V within a VM on ESXi, but I am also running a Nested Windows 10 VM within this Hyper-V VM! How cool is that!? Not sure there are good use cases for this, but if you wanted to, you could! In my opinion (although I may be bias because I work for VMware, but results speak for itself), VMware truly provides the best platform to the widest variety of x86 guest operating systems that exists.

Here are the guest operating systems that are currently "listed" in vSphere today that can be selected:

Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (32-bit)
Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (64-bit)
Apple Mac OS X 10.6 (32-bit)
Apple Mac OS X 10.6 (64-bit)
Apple Mac OS X 10.7 (32-bit)
Apple Mac OS X 10.7 (64-bit)
Apple Mac OS X 10.8 (64-bit)
Apple Mac OS X 10.9 (64-bit)
Asianux 3 (32-bit)
Asianux 3 (64-bit)
Asianux 4 (32-bit)
Asianux 4 (64-bit)
CentOS 4/5/6 (32-bit)
CentOS 4/5/6/7 (64-bit)
Debian GNU/Linux 4 (32-bit)
Debian GNU/Linux 4 (64-bit)
Debian GNU/Linux 5 (32-bit)
Debian GNU/Linux 5 (64-bit)
Debian GNU/Linux 6 (32-bit)
Debian GNU/Linux 6 (64-bit)
Debian GNU/Linux 7 (32-bit)
Debian GNU/Linux 7 (64-bit)
FreeBSD (32-bit)
FreeBSD (64-bit)
IBM OS/2
Microsoft MS-DOS
Microsoft Small Business Server 2003
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
Microsoft Windows 3.1
Microsoft Windows 7 (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows 7 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows 8 (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows 8 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows 95
Microsoft Windows 98
Microsoft Windows NT
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Web Edition (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Vista (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows Vista (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows XP Professional (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows XP Professional (64-bit)
Novell NetWare 5.1
Novell NetWare 6.x
Novell Open Enterprise Server
Oracle Linux 4/5/6 (32-bit)
Oracle Linux 4/5/6/7 (64-bit)
Oracle Solaris 10 (32-bit)
Oracle Solaris 10 (64-bit)
Oracle Solaris 11 (64-bit)
Other (32-bit)
Other (64-bit)
Other 2.4.x Linux (32-bit)
Other 2.4.x Linux (64-bit)
Other 2.6.x Linux (32-bit)
Other 2.6.x Linux (64-bit)
Other 3.x Linux (32-bit)
Other 3.x Linux (64-bit)
Other Linux (32-bit)
Other Linux (64-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (32-bit)
Other (32-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (64-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (64-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (32-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (64-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (32-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (64-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (32-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (64-bit)
SCO OpenServer 5
SCO OpenServer 6
SCO UnixWare 7
SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 (32-bit)
SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 (64-bit)
SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 (32-bit)
SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 (64-bit)
SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (32-bit)
SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (64-bit)
SUSE Linux Enterprise 8/9 (32-bit)
SUSE Linux Enterprise 8/9 (64-bit)
Serenity Systems eComStation 1
Serenity Systems eComStation 2
Sun Microsystems Solaris 8
Sun Microsystems Solaris 9
Ubuntu Linux (32-bit)
Ubuntu Linux (64-bit)
VMware ESX 4.x
VMware ESXi 5.x

Changing GuestOS Type Using a Custom vCO Workflow in the vSphere Web Client

by // 6 Comments

Something you might not have noticed, is the fact that you can not change or modify the guestOS type after a virtual machine has been created in the new vSphere Web Client, this option is just grayed out.

Though this is a change in behavior compared to the old vSphere C# Client, I actually took this as an opportunity to try out one of the most interesting and unrealized feature in the vSphere 5.1 release. This feature being a tighter integration between vCenter Server and vCenter Orchestrator. This means that you can now take any of your existing vCO workflows or create new workflows and make them directly available to any of the vSphere objects within the new vSphere Web Client as a custom action. 

Note: A feature request/bug has already been filed with VMware to have the ability to change the Guest OS and Guest OS Version for a virtual machine after creation in the vSphere Web Client.

Here is an example of a custom workflow that I created called Change Guest OS Type and as you can see that it only shows up under the context of a virtual machine object in the vSphere Web Client. 

From my perspective, the use cases are endless as you can create ANY custom workflow to perform any action or series of operations that can span across VMware products as well as 3rd party systems and directly present them to your end users in the new vSphere Web Client. Not only that, users can specify which workflows they see by default on a given vSphere object and this can differ from user to user based on their daily set of tasks.

So going back to our scenario, here is a way to change the Guest OS and Guest OS Version using a custom vCO workflow.

Step 1 - Download Change Guest OS Type vCO workflow to local desktop.

Step 2 - Open up the vCO Workflow Client, you can do this by pointing your browser to your vCO Server and click on "Start Orchestrator Client" link.

Step 3 - Import the Change Guest OS Type vCO workflow from your desktop to your vCO Server

Step 4 - Next, we need to go to the vSphere Web Client to make this vCO workflow available on a particular vSphere object, in our case it is a virtual machine. On the home page of the vSphere Web Client, click on "vCenter Orchestrator" icon in the center pane or select it from the navigation pane on the left. Once you are in the vCenter Orchestrator configuration page, select the "Manage" tab and click on the "plus" icon.

In this view, you can specify which default vCO workflows are made available across the various vSphere objects. These can be modified or removed based on the frequency of workflow usage.

Step 5 - Locate the Change Guest OS Type vCO workflow on the left hand side and then click on the Add button. Finally, select type to be virtual machine as this workflow is only applicable to a VM and OK to save the settings.

If we take a look at the vCenter Orchstrator configuration page, we will see our new workflow is now listed as one of the defaults for a virtual machine object. You can edit and modify any of these based on the workflows you wish to see by default. I highly recommend you add workflows that you use frequently so you do not have to search through the entire list each time.

Finally, it is time to test drive our new workflow! Locate a virtual machine and right click on the object, in a second you should see a sub-menu for All vCenter Orchestrator Actions and then select our vCO workflow Change Guest OS Type which will start off a very familiar wizard.

The first screen is the object selected, which in our case is our virtual machine. You can of course change this, but we will leave it as it's context was automatically picked up.

The next screen is to select the Guest OS Family (Windows, Linux & Other) that you wish to modify your virtual machine to.

The last part is just to select the Guest OS Version which is provided as a list of the guest OSes based on your previous selection.

To apply the Guest OS change, just click finish and watch the vCO workflow execute.

Though the functionality of changing the Guest OS is not available in the new vSphere Web Client, you can still provide the same functionality to your end users through a custom vCO workflow which are now tightly integrated into the vSphere Web Client. Hopefully this sparks some ideas on other vCO workflows you can create or expose through the vSphere Web Client in your own environment. I know I have a few in mind 🙂

A big thanks goes out to Christophe Decanini for helping me with a few questions while creating this workflow.