I was recently reading two of Rawlinson Rivera's articles (here and here) on configuring the VSAN Observer to be able to run in an "offline mode". The VSAN Observer currently leverages several open source libraries including Javascript, CSS and Font files to render the UI which assumes you have direct internet access to load these library files. In a traditional Enterprise environment, direct Internet access is usually not available and thought it could be provided either through a white list of proxy addresses, but in most cases it is just blocked.

Rawlinson provided a nice writeup on the specific library files that needs to be downloaded, the directory structure that needs to be created and the modifications required for each file. Unfortunately, the process is quite manual and potentially very error prone which usually screams for some Automation 🙂 I figure I could help my buddy Rawlinson out by creating two scripts which would download all the necessary files and the other script which will go ahead and update all the appropriate VSAN Observer files.

The first script is called download_vsan_observer_offline_files.sh which will download the necessary library files and put them in the expected directory structure externallibs{js,css,font} using cURL. This shell script is meant to run on a system which has Internet access and uses cURL to perform the download. If you do not have cURL, you can update the script to use wget instead. At the end of the script, you should see a directory created called externallibs which will need to be SCP'ed to the VCSA running the VSAN Observer (this is a prerequisite to the second script).

Here is an example of running the shell script:

The second script is called update_vsan_observer_offline_files.sh which runs on the VCSA that will be used for the VSAN Observer. This shell scripts expects the externallibs directory to be present before updating the VSAN Observer files and will error out if it does not detect it.

Here is an example of running the shell script:

At this point you are ready to run your VSAN Observer in an "offline mode" as Rawlinson has documented on his blog. Please refer his article for more details on using the VSAN Observer.

One thing I was pleasantly surprise to see in the latest vSphere 5.5 Update 2 release of the VCSA is that VSAN Observer now supports HTTPS as well as authentication when logging into the VSAN Observer UI. This is a very nice update and I recommend you download the latest release of VCSA to benefit from these new features.