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How to Deploy an OVF/OVA in the ESXi Shell

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I recently answered, what I thought was pretty straight forward question on the VMTN forums about whether it was possible to to deploy an OVA directly onto an ESXi host without leveraging remote tools such as the vSphere Client or the ovftool. The response that I provided was, no it was not possible to deploy an OVF/OVA within the ESXi Shell and recommended the user to take a look at the vSphere Client or the ovftool.

For whatever reason, my brain decided to ponder about this specific question over the weekend (even though I had answered dozen or so questions earlier in the week) and came up an idea that could make this work. As many of you know, I am a big fan of the ovftool and I have written several articles about the tool such as here and here. I wanted to see if I could get the ovftool to run in the ESXi Shell as all the necessary libraries and required packages are all self contained within /usr/lib/vmware-ovftool directory. If this works, it would allow a user to deploy a VM from an OVF or OVA format within the ESXi Shell and would not require a remote system which is great for kickstart deployments or ISO installations. As you probably have guessed, I was able to get this to work 🙂

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please test this in a lab before deploying on production systems.

Before you begin, you will need to get the ovftool installed on an existing Linux system, you can use vMA for your convenience. Next, you will need to use the scp command to copy the entire /usr/lib/vmware-ovftool directory onto an ESXi host. Ensure you place the contents on either a shared or local datastore as the size of the ovftool content is quite large (~119 MB).

In this example, I am scp'ing the ovftool directory to a local VMFS datastore (/vmfs/volumes/datastore1)

scp -r /usr/lib/vmware-ovftool/ root@vesxi50-7:/vmfs/volumes/datastore1

Once you have successfully copied the ovftool directory over to your ESXi host, you will need to make a small tweak to the file located in /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/vmware-ovftool/ovftool (shell script that calls the ovftool binary). You will need to modify the the first line using the vi editor from #!/bin/bash to #!/bin/sh as ESXi does not recognize the bash shell. You are now ready to copy an OVF or OVA to your ESXi host which should also reside within a shared or local datastore.

In this example, I uploaded a SLES OVF to the same datastore which contains the ovftool as seen below from the datastore browser:

Let's go ahead and perform a simple probe operation on the OVF we just uploaded to ensure that ovftool is working as expected. To do so, you just need to specify the full path to the ovftool as well as the full path to either your OVF or OVA file.

Note: The ovftool does take slightly longer to run in the ESXi Shell compared to a regular system with the ovftool installed.

Now that we have confirmed the ovftool is working, let's go ahead and deploy from the OVF image. Even though we are running the ovftool locally in the ESXi Shell, you will still need to specify the credentials to your ESXi host during deployment as ovftool was not designed for this use case.

Note: You must specify both the username and password in the ovftool command line, as the password prompt does not function properly in the ESXi Shell and you will see a looping of  "*" characters on the screen.

If you are familiar with the ovftool, you know you can specify an OVF/OVA from both a local resource as well as remote location such as a web server. Here is another example of deploying an OVF from a remote web server:

We can see that is pretty easy to deploy an OVF or OVA from within the ESXi Shell, but what about unattended installations such as ESXi kickstart? Yep, we can do that too! The easiest way is to compress the vmware-ovftool directory using tar command and then download it remotely using the wget command during the %firstboot stanza. I would also recommend placing your OVF/OVA images on a remote web server as well for centralize management and deployment.

Here is the sample code snippet that can be used in your kickstart:

# download ovftool tar to local storage
wget http://air.primp-industries.com/vmware-ovftool.tar.gz -O /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/vmware-ovftool.tar.gz

# extract ovftool content to /vmfs/volumes/datastore1
tar -xzvf /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/vmware-ovftool.tar.gz -C /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/

# deploy OVF from remote HTTP source
/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/vmware-ovftool/ovftool -dm=thin -ds=datastore1 "--net:access333=VM Network" "http://air.primp-industries.com/SLES-VM/SLES-VM.ovf" "vi://root:[email protected]"

# power on VM
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on $(vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms | grep "SLES-VM" | awk '{print $1}')

As you can see, virtually anything is possible ... even if you thought it was not earlier 🙂

How to Deploy an OVF Located On ESXi Datastore Using ovftool

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I have written several articles in the past about the awesome ovftool which is a versatile remote command-line utility for importing/exporting virtual machines in the OVF format across various VMware products. I mainly run ovftool in either the vMA or on my OSX desktop. When performing an import, the OVF files are local on the same system that has the ovftool installed.

I recently came across an interesting question about using the ovftool to deploy OVF files that are located on an ESXi datastore. My initial thought was that you would not be able to deploy the OVF files since the ovftool would not have access to the files locally. After finishing a recent article about ESXi datastore management using the vCLI's vifs utility, I then realized there might actually be a way to deploy OVF files that are stored on an ESXi datastore.

If you take a look on page 17 of the ovftool user guide, there is a table describing the various source locators that are supported. You can see that the source of an OVF file can be accessed by ovftool in 4 different methods including HTTP/HTTPs which is a key for this specific request.

Source Type Default File Extension Protocol
OVF .ovf File, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP
OVA .ova File, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP
VMX .vmx File
vvApprun N/A File
vCloud Director N/A HTTPS
vSphere N/A vSphere

Files and folders management for a datastore is exposed through the fileManager in the vSphere API and datastores are referenced as a URL or remote path.

A URL has the form

scheme://authority/folder/path?dcPath=dcPath&dsName=dsName

where

  • scheme is http or https.
  • authority specifies the hostname or IP address of the Center or ESX(i) server and optionally the port.
  • dcPath is the inventory path to the Datacenter containing the Datastore.
  • dsName is the name of the Datastore.
  • path is a slash-delimited path from the root of the datastore.

Putting all this together, you can use the ovftool remotely to deploy an OVF file that is stored on an ESX(i) datastore. Below is an example walk through of this process.

Here is an OVF that is stored on a datastore located on an ESXi host:

To identify the URL path to your OVF, you can use a web browser to assist. Point your browser to the following address: https://[ESXI_HOST]/folder

When you first login, you will be brought to the root datacenter, in the case of directly connecting to an ESX(i) host, you will only see "ha-datacenter". Go ahead and select it and then you will be brought to a list of datastores the host has access to.

Select the datastore which contains the OVF file you wish to deploy from and then browse to the specific file.

Make a note of the URL path used to get to the OVF file and the OVF filename itself. Taking the example above, we end up with the following URL path:

https://vesxi50-4.primp-industries.com/folder/MyVM/MyVM.ovf?dcPath=ha-datacenter&dsName=iSCSI-1

To confirm the URL path, we can use ovftool to perform a simple "probe" on our OVF, this will provide you with a quick summary of the OVF.

Next we are ready to import the OVF file to our ESXi host. In this example, we will deploy the OVF to another datastore the ESXi host has access to and configure a specific portgroup to connect to the VM to after deployment. There are various options that can be passed to ovftool, please refer to the ovftool user guide for more details.

One the import has completed, you should now see the VM automatically registered in your ESXi host inventory.

You can see that this method allows you to import an OVF file stored on a datastore locally to the ESXi host as well as an OVF file stored on a remote datastore of another ESXi host. To help manage and deploy your OVF files, you should consider storing them on a centralized "media" datastore or even a WEB/FTP server that can be accessed by the ovftool.

Unattended Deployment of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator

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I deployed VMware's new vCenter Infrastructure Navigator in my lab over the weekend and just like the rest of the other virtual appliances (vCloud, vCO, vCC, vShield), here is how you can automate the deployment of VMware vIN.

Here are the ovf parameters that are available to deploy vCenter Infrastructure Navigator:

  • vm.password
  • vami.gateway.vCenter_Infrastructure_Navigator
  • vami.DNS.vCenter_Infrastructure_Navigator
  • vami.ip0.vCenter_Infrastructure_Navigator
  • vami.netmask0.vCenter_Infrastructure_Navigator

To see these properties before deploying, you can query using the ovftool which can help you identify the name of the ovf variables using the following command:

ovftool --hideEula Navigator-1.0.0.49-592384_OVF10.ova

Note: Before deploying vIN, ensure that you have the vCenter advanced setting VirtualCenter.ManagedIP configured as it is needed by the vService in vIN. For more details, take a look at this blog post on how you can easily automate this.

Here is an example of the ovftool command to deploy vIN Server:

ovftool --acceptAllEulas --skipManifestCheck '--net:Network 1=VM_Network' --datastore=iSCSI-4 --diskMode=thin --name=vin --prop:vami.DNS.vCenter_Infrastructure_Navigator=172.30.0.100 --prop:vami.gateway.vCenter_Infrastructure_Navigator=172.30.0.1 --prop:vami.ip0.vCenter_Infrastructure_Navigator=172.30.0.150 --prop:vami.netmask0.vCenter_Infrastructure_Navigator=255.255.255.0 --prop:vm.password=vmware123 Navigator-1.0.0.49-592384_OVF10.ova 'vi://root:*protected email*/?dns=vesxi50-3.primp-industries.com'

Of course, I wrote a simple shell script deployvIN.sh to help with the deployment. The script assumes you have ovftool installed and the OVF files located in the same directory as the script. You will need to edit the following variables if you wish to deploy vIN:

Note: There are many ways of using the ovftool to deploy an OVF. In this simple example, it requires you to specify an ESX(i) host, but you can modify the locator to deploy to a VM folder or datacenter path. For more examples and options, please take a look at the ovftool documentation.

Here is an example of the script in action:

Once the vIN virtual appliance has been deployed, you can also have it automatically power on by specifying the following parameter --powerOn.

If everything was successful, you should be able to license vCenter Infrastructure Navigator using the vSphere Client C# client and then login to the vSphere Web Client to enable the discovery process for your virtual machines. Shortly after, you should start seeing some application dependency within your vSphere environment like this: