VSAN – Page 25

Automating the silent installation of Site Recovery Manager 5.8 w/Embedded vPostgres DB

10.28.2014 by William Lam // 6 Comments

Last week I had a nice email exchange with Ben Meadowcroft who is the Product Manager for VMware's Site Recovery Manager. While chatting with Ben, I learned about new feature that I was not aware of in the latest SRM 5.8 release which now supports an embedded vPostgres database. Not only does this greatly simplify the installation and not requiring an external database like Microsoft SQL or Oracle, it is also on par in terms scalability with the external databases which is great for customers. I definitely like this improvement in the SRM installation and making it easier to evaluate and POC without requiring a large resource footprint.

UPDATE (11/09/15) - For silent installation of SRM 6.x, please take a look at this article here as some of the install params have changed.

In addition to new database feature, I also learned that SRM supports a silent mode installation which I was not aware of before either. I figured this might come in handy for those needing to automate an SRM deployment given you will need at least two installation: one for the protection site and one for the recovery site. I did not see much documentation on this topic and it has been awhile since I have played with SRM, I thought this would be a good opportunity for some automation goodness as well as checking out some of the new SRM 5.8 features including VSAN support as well as the new vSphere Web Client integration.

In my lab, I wanted to run the a minimal setup and the least amount of Windows 🙂 With that, I was able to use two VCSA, 2 SRM hosts running on Windows 2008 R2 and six Nested ESXi hosts as shown in the diagram below:

To perform a silent installation of SRM, you need to specify a list of 35 parameters to the actual executable which is quite daunting and can also be quite error prone. It actually took me a few tries before I was able to get it working and I wanted to make easier so that anyone can just consume it. I decided to create a simple Windows batch script called install_srm.bat which wraps all the required parameters in a set of variables that can easily be modified by anyone. Out of the 35, only 31 of the parameters can be edited and of those only 15 is really required to be tweaked (which is clearly noted in the script) but also shown below:

SRM_INSTALLER - The full path to the SRM 5.8 installer
DR_TXT_VCHOSTNAME - vCenter Server IP/Hostname
DR_TXT_VCUSR - vCenter Server Username
DR_TXT_VCPWD - vCenter Server Password
VC_CERTIFICATE_THUMBPRINT - vCenter Server SSL SHA1 Thumbprint
DR_TXT_LSN - SRM Local Site Name
DR_TXT_ADMINEMAIL - SRM Admin Email Address
DR_CB_HOSTNAME_IP - SRM Server IP/Hostname
DR_TXT_CERTPWD - SSL Certificate Password
DR_TXT_CERTORG - SSL Certificate Organization Name
DR_TXT_CERTORGUNIT - SSL Certification Organization Unit Name
DR_EMBEDDED_DB_DSN - SRM DB DSN Name
DR_EMBEDDED_DB_USER - SRM DB Username
DR_EMBEDDED_DB_PWD - SRM DB Password
DR_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME - Windows System Account to run SRM Service

Note: To retrieve the vCenter Server SSL Certificate Thumbprint, you can either view the details using a regular web browser as shown in the screenshot below

or you can run the following command on a UNIX/Linux using the openssl utility to extract the thumbprint:

echo -n | openssl s_client -connect [VC-IP-ADDRESS]:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint -sha1

Depending on the number of SRM installations you require, you will need to modify the script to perform those additional deployments. As you can see below, I have my two SRM sites implemented. I have also gone ahead and paired both my SRM setups as well as deploy and configure the vSphere Replication 5.8 using the vSphere Web Client. I definitely recommend checking out the latest SRM 5.8 release if you have not already and you may also want to consider using the embedded vPostgres database for future SRM installation to help simplify the deployment and management of SRM.

For those of you who are interested in the variable mappings to the SRM UI installer (which is pretty straight forward), I took screenshots of each step and mapped them for your convenience.

A killer custom Apple Mac Mini setup running VSAN

10.21.2014 by William Lam // 12 Comments

*** This is a guest blog post from Peter Bjork ***

The first time I was briefed on VMware VSAN, I fell in love. I finally knew how I would build my Home Lab.

Let me first introduce myself, my name is Peter Björk and I work at VMware as Lead Specialist within the EMEA EUC Practice. I fortunately have the opportunity to limit my focus on a very few products and truly specialize in these. I cover two products; VMware ThinApp and VMware Workspace Portal and one feature; the Application Publishing feature of VMware Horizon 6. I’m an End-User application kind of guy. That said, you should understand that I’m far from your ESXi and vSphere expert. If you want to keep up with the latest news in the VMware End-User Computing space make sure to follow me on Twitter, my handle is @thepeb. When I’m not a guest blogger, I frequently blog on the official ThinApp and Horizon Tech blogs.

In my role I produce a lot of blog posts and internal enablement material. I perform many tests using early code drops and on a daily basis I run my home lab to deliver live demos. I need a Home Lab that I can trust and that supports all my work tasks. I started building my lab many years ago. It all started with a single mid tower white box, but pretty soon I ran into resource constraints. I started to investigate what my next upgrade would look like.

I had a few requirements:

Keep the noise down
Shouldn’t occupy that much space
Should be affordable
Modular, I do not have money to buy everything upfront so it should be something I could build on top of.
Should be able to run VMware ESXi/vSphere
Should be cool

[Read more...]

Automate VSAN Observer offline mode configurations

10.09.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

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.