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VMworld Session VCSA INF5975 & INF4528 available to public

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I just found out this week after reading Eric Siebert blog post here, that a select number of VMworld 2015 US sessions have been made available to the general public on YouTube. I thought this was a very nice and pleasant surprise, especially for those who could not attend VMworld to be able to get a taste of some of the topics covered in last weeks conference. I personally have watched both the Cloud Native Apps and Future of NSX session, both of which I think are worth checking out not to mention the various demos in the NSX session!

For me personally, a hot topic that came up in almost every conversation when talking to our customers, field and partners at VMworld was the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). There were also plenty of sessions at the conference that covered the VCSA from basic introduction to performance to availability. Below are the two VCSA sessions that were selected to be made generally available to everyone, one of which I presented on. Hopefully you enjoy both videos and I would also like to thank everyone who attended my session last Monday. It was really great meeting many of my readers as well as customers looking to take advantage of the VCSA and some of the new features in our upcoming release. I also wrote a blog post here on the upcoming release of vSphere 6.0 Update 1 (GA sometime in Q3 2015) with respect to the VCSA in case you missed it.

INF5975 - vCenter Server Appliance as "First Choice" VC

INF4528 - vCenter Server Appliance Best Practices & Tips / Tricks

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 5: New method of patching the VCSA/PSC

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In previous releases of the VCSA, patching and updating of the VCSA was performed through what was known as the VAMI interface which provided both a UI as well as a command-line which I have blogged about here. The simplest and easiest method was of course using the UI which just required opening a browser to https://[VCSA]:5480 as seen in the screenshot below.

UPDATE (09/04/15) - In vSphere 6.0 Update 1, URL based patching is now available. You can find more details here.

patching-vcsa-6.0-0
In the VCSA 6.0, the old VAMI UI interface no longer exists and to update/patch the VCSA you will need to use the appliancesh command-line interface. There is a command called "software-packages" which is used to update/patch the software on the VCSA. This information is also documented here.

patching-vcsa-6.0-2
VMware just recently released a patch update to vSphere 6.0 and one of the updates is applicable to VCSA (Embedded) and VC/PSC (External) as noted in this VMware KB 211640. There are two patches (Third Party & Bug/Security Fix) which are available as an ISO which can be downloaded from here.

patching-vcsa-6.0-1
Before you can apply the patch/update, you will need to mount the patch ISO to your VCSA/PSC using either the vSphere C#/Web Client as you would with any other ISO. The second step is to login to the VCSA/PSC and if you have disable the appliancesh, you just need to type "appliancesh" and you will be prompted to login with your root credentials.

Once logged into the applianesh, the software-packages supports two options:

  • Stage patches from ISO and then install
  • Stage patches from ISO and install at a later time

If you wish to perform the update/patch in a single step by staging and installing, you can run the following command:

software-packages install --iso --acceptEulas

patching-vcsa-6.0-3
If you wish to only stage the patches but not install, you can do so by running the following command:

software-packages stage --iso --acceptEulas

Once you are ready to install the staged patches, you will need to run the following command:

software-packages install --staged

Quick Tip - Configuring HTTP proxy for VAMI via CLI

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An HTTP Proxy is commonly used by customers who do not have direct internet access from within their datacenter to either upload logs or download patches from a particular website. I recently had to configure this within our environment to ensure we could patch against the external repository as we also have the same restriction as majority of our customers. To configure a proxy server for a VMware Virtual Appliance, you can do so using the VAMI interface under the Network section as seen in the screenshot below.

vami-proxy-configuration

I was looking to configure this from the command-line and through some quick test, here is how you do it. There is a command called /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_proxy which accepts two parameters: proxy server and the proxy port.

Here is an example of how the command works:

/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_proxy proxy.vghetto.com 3128

You can view the current proxy settings by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_proxy

There are two additional commands that show only the proxy server and proxy port respectively:

/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_proxy_port
/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_proxy_server

One thing you may have noticed is that these commands do not support configuring a proxy username or password as the VAMI UI does. After looking at the script does, I found that it is just writing it out into /etc/environment configuration file. If you require a proxy username and password, you could just directly edit the file and append the following as an example:

http_proxy=http://username:*protected email*:3128