vcd – Page 2

Configuring a "Whitelist" for VM advanced settings in vCloud Director

05.10.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

The ability to preserve a Virtual Machine's "virtual hardware personality" during an export has been around since the release of vSphere and vCloud Director 5.1 also known as a Lossless OVF Export. However, when it comes time to import that Virtual Machine back into your environment, will it be a "lossless" import? For vSphere, the answer is yes as long as you click on the "Accept extra configuration options" during the import of your OVF/OVA in the vSphere Web Client.

For vCloud Director however, the answer is sadly no. If you try to import an OVF/OVA that contains additional VM advanced settings, vCloud Director will automatically strip away these parameters before importing the Virtual Machine. As annoying as this is for end users, there is a very good reason why this happens.

In a public cloud you do not know who your users are and whether they have malicious intentions. Since the "Extra Configuration" of a Virtual Machine can not be validated, the safest way to guard against this type of a security risk is by sanitizing the content prior to upload.

Although I have known about this default behavior in vCloud Director for some time now, it was only in a recent meeting with some of our internal folks managing our OneCloud environment did I realize how annoying this behavior was for "private" clouds as well. I was looking to import an existing OVF that contains several VM Advanced settings, but realized this would not be supported due to the sanitization of the OVF.

The other issue is that vApps within OneCloud are also exported/re-imported into other vCloud Director environments. Even if our Cloud Administrator were to make a one time exception and manually add these these VM Advanced Settings, they would automatically be stripped away the next time they were re-imported into another environment. After our meeting, I thought there had to be a better way! (at least I hope)

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

In doing a quick bit of research, it turns out this is actually a pretty elegant solution that allows you to create a "Whitelist" of trusted VM advanced settings that would be accepted as part of the import process in vCloud Director. To configure this "Whitelist", you will need to add a new category called ExtraConfigWhitelist into the vCloud Director Database for each and every VM advanced setting that you wish to allow.

To demonstrate this functionality, I have the latest vCloud Director appliance (I believe this should also work on 5.1 as well) running and I would like to add the following VM advanced settings to the whitelist:

scsi0:0.virtualSSD
scsi0:1.virtualSSD
scsi0:2.virtualSSD
disk.enableUUID

Before starting, you will need to SSH to our vCloud Director instance and stop the VCD service by running the following command:

/etc/init.d/vmware-vcloud stop

Next, you will need to switch over to the "oracle" user by running the following command:

su - oracle

sqlplus vcloud/VCloud

Once you have logged in, you will need to insert the following rows into the "config" table of VCD Database:

INSERT INTO config (config_id, cat, name, value, sortorder) VALUES (seq_config.NextVal, 'ExtraConfigWhitelist', 'scsi0:0.virtualSSD', 'true', 0);
INSERT INTO config (config_id, cat, name, value, sortorder) VALUES (seq_config.NextVal, 'ExtraConfigWhitelist', 'scsi0:1.virtualSSD', 'true', 0);
INSERT INTO config (config_id, cat, name, value, sortorder) VALUES (seq_config.NextVal, 'ExtraConfigWhitelist', 'scsi0:2.virtualSSD', 'true', 0);
INSERT INTO config (config_id, cat, name, value, sortorder) VALUES (seq_config.NextVal, 'ExtraConfigWhitelist', 'disk.enableUUID', 'true', 0);

Note: The syntax used here is for an Oracle database. You may need to tweak it if you are using MS SQL Server.

Finally, for the changes to go live you just need to start up your VCD instance:

/etc/init.d/vmware-vcloud start

Once the VCD service has returned, you can now import any OVF/OVA that contains a list of approved VM advanced settings and VCD will ensure these settings are preserved as part of the import. I hope this solution is something our OneCloud team will consider as it solves my immediate problem but I also think this can greatly benefit the overall use base, especially those building out content.

Note: Even though this "whitelist" option is available, I would still recommend you carefully determine which VM advanced setting is required for your environment and minimize the size of the list as much as possible from an operational perspective, especially when it comes to new installation or upgrades.

How To Run The SilverLining Fling Without Installing It In vCloud Director

02.26.2013 by William Lam // 5 Comments

A few weeks back the VMware Lab's team released a cool new fling called SilverLining which allows users to build a simplified user-interface for vCloud Director. This interface can be run from any modern web-browser that supports HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. To access the SilverLining interface, you must first install it on a vCloud Director 5.1 Cell.

From a development or proof of concept perspective, it would be really nice to be able to run SilverLining locally from your desktop and point it to a valid vCloud Director 5.1 instance for testing. Well, this is exactly what Andrea Siviero, a Consulting Architect for VMware discovered while playing around with the SilverLining Fling.

UPDATE: 2/28 - For Safari, you can use open /Applications/Safari.app/ --args -disable-web-security

Disclaimer: The solution described here is specifically for Chrome running on Mac OS X or Windows. I have not looked into equivalent settings for other browsers.

Here are the steps required to make this work:

Step 1 - Download SilverLining and extract the contents to your local desktop

Step 2 - Under Silverlining->js directory, there is a file called main.js that needs to be modified. Add the following right under "$(document).ready(function() {" which should point to the base URL of your vCloud Director instance:

localStorage.server = "https://vcd.primp-industries.com";

Step 3 - Launch Chrome with the additional argument via the command-line and load the index.html in the SilverLining directory:

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/ --args -disable-web-security

Note: For Windows version of Chrome just pass in the following either via command-line or shortcut to Chrome.exe -disable-web-security

If everything was successful, you should be able to login to the vCloud Organization of your choice and see all the vApps and Catalogs you have access to!

If you receive the "You are attempting to connect to a system no longer supported" shown in the screenshot below:

You may be pointing to a vCloud Director instance that is using a self-signed certificate and you will need to trust the site before proceeding. To do so, open up a new tab and enter the following URL (substituting your vCloud Director URL):

https://vcd.primip-industries.com/api/versions

Click on the "Proceed Anyway" and then reload the index.html page and you should now be able to login to vCloud Director.

I would like to thank Andrea for sharing this awesome tip! Now you can easily develop and test your own custom interface using the Javascript SDK provided by SilverLining all on your desktop. Best of all, you can now point this to any remote vCloud Director 5.1 instance whether that be private or public!

Having Difficulties Enabling Nested ESXi in vSphere 5.1?

09.29.2012 by William Lam // 21 Comments

I noticed there were a few folks having some difficulties enabling Nested ESXi (VHV Virtual Hardware Virtualization) in the latest release of ESXi 5.1 and I thought I share some additional info and tips on troubleshooting your setup in case you are running into similar problems.

*** DISCLAIMER **** This is not officially supported by VMware, do not bother asking if it is supported or calling into VMware support for details or help.

If you wish to run nested ESXi or other hypervisors on ESXi 5.1 and run 32-bit nested virtual machines, you must meet the following hardware requirement:

CPU supporting Intel VT-x or AMD-V

If you wish to run nested 64-bit virtual machines in your nested ESXi or other hypervisors, in addition to the requirement above, you must also meet the following hardware requirement:

CPU supporting Intel EPT or AMD RVI

If you only meet the first criteria, you CAN still install nested ESXi or other hypervisors on ESXi 5.1, BUT you will only be able to run 32-bit nested virtual machines. When you create your virtual machine shell using the new vSphere Web Client, in the expanded CPU view, the "Hardware Virtualization" box will be grayed out. This is expected as you do not have full support for VHV, but you can still continue with your installation of ESXi or other hypervisors.

In ESXi 5.0, you may have been able to run 64-bit nested virtual machines without EPT/RVI support but performance was extremely poor. With ESXi 5.1, VHV now requires EPT/RVI.

Note: During the installation of ESXi, you may see the following message "No Hardware Virtualization Support", you can just ignore it.

If you are using sites such as Intel's ark.intel.com to check your CPU requirements, be aware that it is COMMON even for the hardware vendors to publish incorrect information about their websites. However, there is a quick way you can validate on your ESXi host whether you have full VHV support.

In vSphere 5.1, there is a new capability property called nestedHVSupported which specifies whether your physical ESXi 5.1 host has full VHV support. This property will only be true IF your CPU has both Intel-VT+EPT or AMD-V+RVI. A quick and easy way to validate this is using the vSphere MOB to retrieve the value.

To check nestedHVSupported property, please enter the following into a web browser (substitute the IP Address/hostname of your ESXi host):

https://himalaya.primp-industries.com/mob/?moid=ha-host&doPath=capability

After you login, search for the nestedHVSupported property on the page and you should see a value of either true or false. As mentioned earlier, if it is false, you might still be able to install nested ESXi or other hypervisors but you will not be able to run nested 64-bit virtual machines. I would also recommend taking a look at your system BIOS to ensure things like Intel-VT/EPT and AMD-V/RVI are enabled and sometimes it might just be as simple as a BIOS upgrade (you can always confirm by contacting the hardware vendor if you have further questions).

For proper networking connectivity, also ensure that either your standard vSwitch or Distributed Virtual Switch has both promiscuous mode and forged transmit enabled either globally on the portgroup or distributed portgroup your nested ESXi hosts are connected to.

Additional Resources: