osx – Page 4

Standalone VMRC now available for Mac OS X

04.15.2015 by William Lam // 55 Comments

Last year, a standalone Virtual Machine Remote Console (VMRC) was released for Windows as part of vSphere 5.5 Update 2b which provides an alternative way of launching the VM console due to NPAPI deprecation. There was of course a huge request for Mac OS X support and the VMRC team has been working hard and today I am please to announce that standalone VMRC is now available for Apple Mac OS X which you can download using the following URL: www.vmware.com/go/download-vmrc

Note: Mac OS X 10.8 or greater is required to use the new Standalone VMRC. The release notes will be updated to reflect this requirement

There are currently two methods of launching a remote console to a Virtual Machine using the vSphere Web Client as seen in the screenshot below:

Using HTML5 VMRC simply by clicking on the thumbnail preview
Using the new Standalone VMRC by clicking on the "Launch Remote Console" link

When using the Standalone VMRC method, instead of opening the VM console in the browser, it will launch the native VMRC application on your system whether that be Windows or Mac OS X. All basic functionalities of the Standalone VMRC is available as you would expect such as power operations, device management, etc.

Note: There is not a specific version of vSphere that is required to directly launch the Standalone VMRC. However, to launch it within the vSphere Web Client, you will need vSphere 5.5 Update 2b or greater.

The other great thing about the Standalone VMRC is that it can function without vCenter Server and the vSphere Web Client and you can actually use it to connect to VM directly on an ESXi host. To use the VMRC without the vSphere Web Client, you will need to construct the VMRC URI which looks like the following:

vmrc://clone:[TICKET]@[HOST]:[PORT]/?moid=[VM-MOREF]

where TICKET is obtained by calling the AcquireCloneTicket() method using the SessionManager in vCenter Server. The HOST will either be the Hostname/IP Address of vCenter Server and the PORT should be default to 443 and you will need to specify the VM MoRef ID. In the case of a standalone ESXi host, you would just change the HOST property. If you do not wish to use the clone ticket, you can also just provide the following URI which will prompt for your ESXi credentials

vmrc://@[HOST]:[PORT]/?moid=[VM-MOREF]

Once you have generated the VMRC URI, you MUST launch it through a web browser as that is how it is passed directly to the Standalone VMRC application. In my opinion, this is not ideal especially for customers who wish to automatically generate this as part of a VM provisioning workflow to their end users and not having to require a browser to launch the Standalone VMRC application. If you have some feedback on this, please do leave a comment.

In the mean time, a quick workaround is to use the "open" command on Mac OS X along with the VMRC URI which will automatically load it into your default browser and launch the Standalone VMRC application for you.

open 'vmrc://clone:cst-VCT-52e44ad7-712f-9f45-a9ee-13ec6a74acaf--tp-B1-6F-91-F6-B5-8F-80-E5-FD-D6-E1-8B-10-F7-FE-15-C5-2A-75-41@192.168.1.60:443/?moid=vm-18'

UPDATE (05/31/15) - If you are connecting directly to an ESXi host you can either use the vSphere API to query for the VM MoRef ID or you can easily pull it by running the following command directly in the ESXi Shell:

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

I am sure there are probably a few of you asking, what about for Linux users? Well, you can probably guess what is being worked on next 😉

How to deploy VCSA 6.0 using the HTML UI Installer on Mac OS X?

03.31.2015 by William Lam // 6 Comments

I know some of you were disappointed like I was that the new VCSA 6.0 HTML UI Installer is only currently supported on Windows and does not work on Mac OS X. I have been told by Product Management that this is temporary and that Mac OS X support will be coming in a future update. In the meantime, if you do not wish to spin up a Windows VM just to deploy the new VCSA from the HTML UI Installer, you can check out this tiny hack that allows you to deploy the new VCSA 6.0

Note: This trick will only allow you to deploy either an Embedded VCSA or Platform Service Controller. It does not work when trying to deploy an vCenter Server Management Node which is why I suspect Mac OS X support was not in this initial release of vSphere 6.0.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

Step 1 - You will need to download and install the vSphere Client Integration Package (CIP) 6.0 package for Mac OS X by visiting the following URL: http://vsphereclient.vmware.com/vsphereclient/VMware-ClientIntegrationPlugin-6.0.0.mac64.dmg

Step 2 - You will need to extract the VCSA ISO to your local filesystem

Step 3 - Open up a terminal and change into the root directory of the extract VCSA ISO and we will need to modify the vcsa-setup.html file.

Step 4 - Run the following sed command which will replace the check for the OS platform from Windows to Mac OS X:

sed -i .bak 's/Win32/MacIntel/g' vcsa-setup.html

Note: You might also be able to use this trick for Linux desktop by properly replacing the navigator.platform property with the correct OS type.

Step 5 - Open the vcsa-setup.html using either Firefox or Chrome and give it a few seconds for the CIP to be loaded and you should be able to launch the VCSA HTML UI Installer as seen in the screenshot below

I have found sometimes the HTML UI is stuck at the "Starting VMware vSphere Web Client" screen but when you look at the VM Console of the deployed VCSA, it is completely done. I recommend that if the VM Console looks done, you can just close this screen and just open a browser connecting to the hostname/IP Address of your new VCSA and everything should be working as expected.

If you prefer to deploy the VCSA 6.0 on Mac OS X through an officially supported method, there is also a new VCSA CLI Installer that is supported on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux which you can find more details in this whitepaper here. In addition to this trick, you can also deploy the new VCSA 6.0 directly to vCenter Server or onto VMware Workstation/Fusion, for those alternative approaches be sure to check out my Ultimate automation guide to deploying the VCSA 6.0.

Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 10

12.19.2014 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Company: Fitstar
Software: VMware vSphere
Hardware: Apple Mac Mini

[William] - Hi Clay, thanks for taking some time out of your schedule this afternoon to talk with us regarding one of the projects are you are currently working on. Before we get started, can you quickly introduce yourself and your current role within VMware?

[Clay] - Good morning and thanks for having me! My name is Clay Alvord, and I am a Senior Prototype Engineer, here at VMware. I work with hardware vendors as they develop new equipment, and get it in the hands of the developers here. It allows our engineers to get early access to pre-release gear, in the hope that as the equipment comes to market, it's on our HCL at the same time. It also allows us to help debug the hardware as its developed, so we don't hit any critical surprises after release.

[William] - Thanks Clay, very cool role! So, I hear you have been working closely with a new startup who has built a really interesting design involving VMware & Mac Mini’s? Could you provide us some more details around the design and the type of application/workload the customer has planned for this infrastructure?

[Clay] - Thats exactly right. FitStar deals with a lot of high resolution video, so their storage requirements are above average for a company their size. Most of their servers live in Amazon's EC2 cloud, and so they are already heavy users of Amazon's services. Amazon has a product called Amazon Storage Gateway (ASG). ASG allows for local storage to be mirrored to EC2, or have the your most commonly access EC2 files cached locally.

What I have designed is a local storage array, with a an Apple Mac Mini running ESXi 5.5 and Amazon's Gateway (local) storage. This gives the users the speed of local storage, with the safety-net of having their data in EC2 at the same time.

[William] - How many Mac Mini’s are they currently running on-premises and what hardware configuration did the customer choose for their specific application requirements? Were there any constraints that you had faced due to the limited resources the Mac Mini’s provided?

[Clay] - They have 1 Mac Mini, and 1 Dell Poweredge. The Mac was a hard requirement, because the original design required us to run OSX server.

We opted for the Mac Mini as it fit the budget better, when compared to a Mac Pro. The Mac Mini is a Late 2012 and has a 3Ghz cpu, with 16GB of ram. Our biggest constraint is the memory in the system. We run 2 storage gateway VM's on the dell. Each one requiring 8GB of memory. We could not have it all on the Mac Mini as the Mini only supports 16GB in total and does not have room for future growth.

The Mac Mini has 3 Mac OS X VMs. 2 of them are OS X 10.10, each running OS X Server. One for dedicated Xcode buildbot, and app caching. The other for Time Machine services. The 3rd VM is running Mac OS X 10.9 Server and is purely for file sharing.

Here is a picture of Fitstar's setup:

Here are some additional physical and logical diagrams of the setup:

[William] - How much storage is currently being managed today and how is that presented to the VMs? Do they have plans on increasing either the storage or compute platforms as they grow?

[Clay] - The storage array has 2 RAID-6 luns, serving a total of 20TB to the Dell host over iSCSI. The host then breaks up the storage into 1TB disks that are then attached the two ASG VMs. The VMs, mirror the data to Amazon and then present new iSCSI targets to the Mac Mini host. From there we use Raw Device Mappings to attach the file server and backup server.

[William] - This looks like a really cool solution that you’ve architected with the customer. For a startup, I was kind of surprised to hear they went with vSphere versus going down an open source route and potentially using some type of Cloud Services? Do you know what the motivation was that lead the customer to choose vSphere and running an on-premise solution?

[Clay] - The motivation of going ESXi over an alternative solution had several factors. The first was Fitstar's familiarity with VMware, as well as my own. The second was this solution is the backbone of their company and they needed a world class solution that has not only a strong support system, but a HUGE community behind it. Lastly, it was the hard requirement to use ASG. Using ASG allows for the volumes to be directly mounted in a EC2 instance in case of an emergency. Amazon also states that the ASG vm's are optimized for ESX and Hyper V.

[William] - That is great to hear that even for startups, having an enterprise and highly available platform such as vSphere is critical to their business. Were there any challenges while designing and deploying this infrastructure, either from a deployment or operational point of view?

[Clay] - Definitely. This project was originally designed with just file services in mind. The original POC was a local storage array, and the Mac Mini. The Mini would run a ASG and 1 OS X VM.

When it was decided that we needed Xcode, Caching and Time Machine services, we opted for a dedicated VM for each of theses. The reason is that if there were issues or heavy load with any of them, it would not affect the others.

Some of the other challenges we had was getting iSCSI to play well with Mac OS X. We were planning on having the iSCSI connections go directly to the VMs, and bypass ESXi, but 3rd party drivers don't work with Amazon's version of iSCSI. As a result, we now connect to the hypervisor, and use raw mappings to the VMs. We opted for raw mappings so that if we mount a volume in EC2, it sees a HFS+ disk, not a VMFS one with HFS inside.

We also had trouble getting the OS X server services to work on virtualized hardware. ultimately we adjusted the vm parameters to expose the hardware ID's to the vm, and so OS X thinks it running on physical hardware.

We are still working on plenty of tweaks to the system. I have seen a OS X panic, and kernel logs point at VMware Tools as the culprit. We have filed a bug for this. We also have an issue that the nics in the Mac Mini are e1000, not e1000e. This occasionally leads to a PSOD. The work around we plan on introducing is Thunderbolt to ethernet adapters.

The last ESXi related hurdle is that in order for the VMs on the Mac Mini to auto start, the Dell and AGS VMs must be online, and the Mini has to have already scanned its storage adapters. So in the event of a power outage, when everything powers up, you must rescan storage on the mini, after the Dell is online, then power up the Mini's VM's. We have installed a battery backup unit, and are in the middle of automating the scan and power up of the Mini's VMs.

[William] - Clay, thank you very much for taking the time and sharing with us some of the innovative things our customers are doing with Apple and our vSphere platform. I really enjoy hearing about how our customers push our software to its limits and find new use cases that we had never thought about. Thanks again for sharing. Finally, before I let you go, do you have any words of advice or tips for other customers having similar requirements, especially those coming from a Startup? Any particular resources you recommend them checking out before getting started?

[Clay] - It was my pleasure. virtuallyGhetto has been a great resource for me in standing up the project. I have some tips and tricks related to this and some other things on my site www.geeksnthings.com as well.

If you are interested in sharing your story with the community (can be completely anonymous) on how you use VMware and Mac OS X in Production, you can reach out to me here.