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Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 3

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To conclude this three-part blog series, we are now going take a look at reference implementation for building your own Microsoft Windows Virtual Appliance (VA). Similar to the Linux VA build, the Windows OVA will also support the ability to customize basic networking configuration including the use of a static or DHCP option.

In addition, to demonstrate the endless possibilities for building your own VA, I have also included an option to automatically join a Microsoft Active Directory Domain as part of the OVA deployment, which is a fairly common operation after deploying a Windows-based system. In the example below, I am using Windows Server 2016 and PowerShell to perform all the required automation.

Step 1 - Create a new VM in vCenter Server and then install Window Server 2016 using the ISO. Once you have completed the OS installation, you may want to apply any patches or packages that you want included as part of your VA. Once that is done, go ahead and shut down the VM.

Step 2 - Select the VM in the vSphere Inventory and then click on Configure->vApp and then check the Enable vApp Options. Once enabled, select OVF environment for the IP allocation scheme. In the OVF Details tab, select VMware Tools for the OVF environment transport. (Optionally) You can specify some additional metadata including appliance name and URLs to help others who maybe consuming your VA once it has been exported to an OVF/OVA.

Step 3 - Next, add the following 9 OVF properties which will be used as input to configure networking within PhotonOS. Click Add and provide a Label, Key and optional Category.

Label Key Category
Hostname guestinfo.hostname Networking
IP Address guestinfo.ipaddress Networking
Netmask guestinfo.netmask Networking
Gateway guestinfo.gateway Networking
DNS Server guestinfo.dns Networking
DNS Domain guestinfo.domain Networking
AD Domain guestinfo.ad_domain Active Directory
AD Username guestinfo.ad_username Active Directory
AD Password guestinfo.ad_password Active Directory


Step 3 - Power back on the VM and once it is available on the network (assuming DHCP), download and copy the sample first boot script customize-windows-server-guest.ps1 to C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop. This script is where all the magic happens and will process the OVF property input and then configure the network settings and if specified, it will also perform the Active Directory domain join. Right now it assumes the networking fields are optional, meaning if they are left blank, it will default the system to DHCP. If you provide all input properties, then it will go ahead and configure a static network address.

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Running sk8s (Simple Kubernetes) on VMC with an AWS Elastic Load Balancer

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Last week I wrote about a really nifty Virtual Appliance called sk8s which can be used to quickly setup a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster for development and testing purposes. If you have not checked out that article, be sure to give that a read first to get the full context. As mentioned in the previous article, sk8s runs great on any vSphere deployment but it can also run on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which adds an additional capability where an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) can automatically be provisioned and configured to front-end the k8s control plane as part of the deployment for external access.

The nice benefit of this is that you only need to configure access to the ELB and not directly to the underlying VMs running within the SDDC, both simplifying the setup but also reducing the need to expose the VMs directly to the internet. The write-up below is similar to that of the previous article, but it does expand into greater detail when deploying to VMC and all the required configuration changes within the VPC using the AWS Console and the Network and Security changes using the VMC Console.

Note: If you decide to use the integrated AWS ELB integration, please be aware that you will be charged for the consumption. For pricing, please see the AWS documentation here.

Prerequisites:

  • Access to the VMC Console and VMC SDDC
  • NSX-T Logical Network with DHCP enabled
  • AWS Access & Secret Key for automatically creating ELB (Optional)
  • govc

Step 1 - Install govc on your local desktop which has access to your VMC vSphere environment. If you have not installed govc, the quickest way is to simply download the latest binary, below is an example of installing the latest MacOS version:

curl -L https://github.com/vmware/govmomi/releases/download/v0.20.0/govc_darwin_amd64.gz | gunzip > /usr/local/bin/govc
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/govc

Step 2 - We need to verify a few settings in the AWS Console to ensure that the VPC that is connected to your SDDC is properly configured so that the provisioning of the ELB will be successful.

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sk8s - Simple Kubernetes (k8s) Virtual Appliance

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I recently had a need for a for a basic Kubernetes (k8s) Cluster which I also needed to have running locally in my vSphere Home Lab for testing purposes. I know there are a number of great blog articles out there that shows you how to setup your own k8s from scratch, including a recent blog series from Myles Gray. However, I was looking for something quick that I could consume without requiring any setup. To be honest, installing your own k8s from scratch is so 2017 😉

If you ask most people, they simply just want to consume k8s as an integrated solution that just works and not have to worry about installing and managing the underlying components that make up k8s. VMware PKS and PKS Cloud are two great examples of this where Pivotal and VMware provides a comprehensive solution (including Software Defined Networking) for managing the complete lifecycle (Day 0 to Day N) for running Enterprise K8s, whether that is within your own datacenter or running as a public cloud service. For my exploratory use case, PKS was overkill and I also did not have the required infrastructure setup in this particular environment, so I had to rule that out for now.

While searching online, I accidentally stumbled onto a recent VMware Open Source project called sk8s, short for Simple Kubernetes (k8s) which looked really interesting. At first glance, a few things stood out to me immediately. This project was created by none other than Andrew Kutz, for those not familiar with Andrew's work, he famously created the Storage vMotion UI plugin for the vSphere C# Client before VMware had native UI for the feature. He was also the creator of the first vCenter Simulator back in the day called simDK that was also widely used by a number of customers including myself. I knew Andrew had joined our Cloud Native Business Unit (CNABU), but I was not sure what he was up to these days, guess I now know 🙂 and is helping both VMware and the OSS community in k8s development.

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