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How to automate the deployment of an un-configured VCSA 6.5 (Stage 1 only)?

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In vSphere 6.5, the VCSA deployment has changed from a "Single" monolithic stage where a user inputs all of the required parameters up front and then the installer goes and deploys/configures the VCSA. In the new VCSA UI Installer, we still continue to provide a "Single" monolithic user experience but behind the scenes, the deployment is now actually composed of two distinct stages, creatively called Stage 1 and Stage 2.

  • Stage 1 - Initial OVA deployment which includes basic networking + OS password
  • Stage 2 - Applying the VCSA specific configurations (e.g. External Platform Services or Embedded VCSA)

One reason why this is so useful is that in previous releases of the VCSA, if you had fat fingered say the DNS entry or wanted to change the IP Address/Hostname before applying the actual application configurations, your only option was to re-deploy the VCSA, not a very good user experience. With this new deployment model, customers now have the ability to either go through both Stage 1 and Stage2 or they can stop just after Stage 1 which would allow them to make necessary edits before continuing to Stage 2. If you decide to stop after Stage 1, then to complete the deployment, you will need to open a browser and finish the configuration using the VCSA's Virtual Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) at https://[VCSA-HOSTNAME-OR-IP]:5480

vcsa-6-5-installer-3
Once on the VAMI UI, you will want to select the "Set up vCenter Server Appliance" which will then launch the configuration wizard. From here, you will have the option of changing some of the settings that you had provided in Stage 1 such as the IP Address or things like NTP or enabling SSH access as shown in the screenshot below. Once you have confirmed these settings, it will be saved and then you will move onto Stage 2 to complete the configuration of your VCSA deployment.

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vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) PowerCLI 6.5 community module

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As some of you may know, I have been spending some time with the new vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) feature that was introduced in vSphere 6.5. In fact, I had even published an article a few weeks back on how to enable the new vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) feature with only a single ESXi host which allowed me to explore some of the new VCHA APIs without needing a whole lot of resources to start with, obviously, you would not do this in production 🙂

For those of you who are not familiar with the new VCHA feature which is only available with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), Feidhlim O'Leary has an excellent write up that goes over the details and even provides demo videos covering both the "Basic" and "Advanced" workflows of VCHA. I highly recommend you give his blog post a read before moving forward as this article will assume you understand how VCHA works.

In playing with the new VCHA APIs, I decided to create a few VCHA functions which I thought would be useful to have as a PowerCLI module for others to use and also try out. With that, I have published my VCHA.psm1 module on the PowerCLI Community Repo on Github which includes the following functions:

Name Description
Get-VCHAConfig Retrieves the VCHA Configuration
Get-VCHAClusterHealth Retrieve the VCHA Cluster Health
Set-VCHAClusterMode Sets the VCHA Cluster Mode (Enable/Disable/Maintenance)
New-VCHABasieConfig Creates a new "Basic" VCHA Cluster
Remove-VCHACluster Destroys a VCHA Cluster

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vCommunity "shorts" on their experiences w/the VCSA Migration

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The feedback from our customers on both the initial release of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool (vSphere 6.0 Update 2m) as well as the updated version included in the release of vSphere 6.5 has just been absolutely fantastic! The feedback has not only been positive in terms of customers experience with using the Migration Tool to go from a Windows-based vCenter Server to the VCSA, but also with their experience with the VCSA itself which has come a long from when it was first released back with vSphere 5.0.

As with any customer feedback (good as well as the bad), I share this feedback directly with the Engineering/Product teams so that they know which areas customers have found useful and which areas we can still improve upon. One source of customer feedback which I see quite a bit of discussions on regarding the VCSA Migration Tool is on Twitter and being an active user myself, it is also makes it quite easy to collect and share this feedback internally. I even created the #migrate2vcsa hashtags a few years back to make it easy for customers to provide feedback for all things related to the VCSA Migration.

Most recently, I was looking for a better way to share as well as aggregate some of the feedback from Twitter regarding the VCSA Migration Tool. Instead of manually tracking individual tweet links via an email or document, I wanted to anyone to be able to get a quick glance at the overall feedback. I started to look around and came across an interesting SaaS solution called Storify which allows you to tell "stories" by using content from various Social Media sources such as blog posts, Youtube or Twitter for example.

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