guestinfo – Page 3

How to change/deploy VCSA 6.0 with default bash shell vs appliancesh?

03.06.2015 by William Lam // 10 Comments

When logging into the new VCSA 6.0 via SSH, you will notice that you are no longer dropped into a normal bash shell but into a new appliancesh (pronounced appliance shell) environment. This new interface provides basic set of virtual appliance management capabilities including Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) access which makes the majority of operations convenient to a vSphere Administrator but it also helps restrict unnecessary access to the underlying filesystem which can be helpful from a security standpoint.

If you need to access the underlying filesystem, you can temporarily enable it by running the following two commands:

shell.set --enabled True
shell

If you need to transfer files to/from the VCSA via SCP/WinSCP, you will need to change the default shell from /bin/appliancesh to /bin/bash else the operation will fail. You can easily do this by using the chsh command:

chsh -s "/bin/bash" root

If you rather have the BASH shell configured as the default after deployment and not have to go through this manual process each time, you can actually configured using the following hidden option called guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.shell

This property allows you to specify the default shell for the "root" account and you can only modify this if you deploy the VCSA using ovftool. Here is the parameter you would append to the ovftool argument list:

--prop:guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.shell="/bin/bash"

You can leverage this new property and automate the deployment of the new VCSA 6.0 and for more details be sure to check out my VCSA 6.0 Automation Series.

How to evaluate the vSphere VCSA Beta running on VMware Fusion & Workstation?

10.13.2014 by William Lam // 17 Comments

If you are taking part in the vSphere Beta (available to public to sign up but still under NDA), you may have recently noticed a new milestone release (RC) that has been made available for download. Having been a long time Beta participant when I was customer and still continuing to do so in my current role, the best way to evaluate and test new VMware software is to of course run them on top of vSphere! I know this may not be an option for everyone and the next best thing would be to use VMware Fusion or Workstation.

For those of you who have tried to run the vSphere Beta of VCSA on VMware Fusion or Workstation, you may have found that it does not work as there are some input parameters that are required as part of the new VCSA deployment. These parameters leverages OVF properties which are currently not supported in VMware Fusion and Workstation and therefore the new injectOvfEnv option in ovftool can not be used.

Having said that, VMware Engineering is quite aware that this can be challenging for many customers as well as VMware Employees who make use of Fusion and Workstation on a daily basis. That is why they have built the VCSA to be quite flexible to support both vSphere as well as Fusion and Workstation, however the process may not be completely obvious for the latter. If you inspect the latest VCSA Beta OVA, which you will need to extract from the ISO, you will notice a series of "keys" that begin with guestinfo which is just leveraging custom key/value pairs for the OVF environment.

Ideally, these are passed in from the OVF Properties using either the vSphere Web Client or the new VCSA deployment tool. However, due to the lack of OVF Property support, it can also be passed in through the VMX file of the Virtual Machine.

Here are the steps to deploy the VCSA Beta using either VMware Fusion or Workstation:

Step 1 - Download the VCSA Beta which is available as an ISO

Step 2 - Extract the contents of the ISO and add the .ova extension to following file located in vcsa/vmware-vcsa (this is the VCSA OVA)

Step 3 - Upload the OVA using either VMare Fusion or Workstation (you can either double click or just go to File->Open) but make sure you do not power it on after deployment. (this is very important)

Step 4 - Locate the directory in which the VCSA was deployed to and open up the VMX file and append the following (make sure to change the IP information and passwords based on your environment):

guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr.family = "ipv4"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.mode = "static"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr = "192.168.1.90"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.prefix = "24"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.gateway = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.dns.servers = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.password = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.passwd = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.time.tools-sync = "True"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.ssh.enabled = "True"

Note: The example above is a very basic VCSA deployment which should suffice for the majority of you. If you wish to deploy a more complex scenario, you can inspect the VCSA OVA for additional parameters and see their expected values.

Step 5 - Once you have saved your changes, go ahead and power on the VCSA. At this point, the guestinfo properties that you just added will be read in by VMware Tools as the VCSA is booting up and the configuration will begin. Depending on the speed of your hardware, hopefully in a very short amount of time you will have a fully configured VCSA that is ready for your evaluation and testing.

Here is a screenshot of running the VCSA Beta on both VMware Fusion and Workstation:

If you wanted to take this one step further and automate the entire deployment, you can leverage the ovftool to deploy the OVA as shown with the Fusion example below:

'/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware OVF Tool/ovftool' --name=vmware-vcsa --acceptAllEulas --allowExtraConfig /PATH/TO/VCSA/OVA '/Users/lamw/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized'

and then append the specific configuration using either an echo or here-statement. You can also do the same on Windows leveraging either plain Windows Bat script or PowerShell.

Hopefully for those of you who only have access to Fusion or Workstation, you can now also take part in the vSphere Beta if you do not have a vSphere lab that can be used. I would also recommend checking out the vSphere Beta Community as there is a new contest that launched today for finding bugs in the latest RC release. Not only can you help improve the product through your feedback, you can also win some some $$$ in doing so!

OVF Runtime Environment

06.11.2012 by William Lam // 36 Comments

I recently noticed a trend of questions from various users about extracting specific bits of information such as the version of ESXi that's running or the MoRef ID of the VM, all while within the guestOS. I had already written an article about this topic awhile back called How to extract host information from within a VM? but it seems like there is still a continued interest to easily obtain this information about the underlying vSphere infrastructure from within the guestOS.

I came across another method while researching a different topic which is to use the vApp property of a VM called the OVF runtime environment. This is a feature that has been around since the early days of vSphere 4.x, if not earlier which provides a mechanism to retrieve some of this information as well as custom properties. The OVF feature provides users with the capability to pass in any type of metadata information such as application start up parameters, network configuration, password management, etc. directly into the guestOS for flexible guest customization.

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