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How to create custom ESXi boot menu to support multiple Kickstart files?

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I recently received a question from one of my readers who was looking to migrate from ESXi 4.1 to newer version and one of the challenges they faced was around their ESXi scripted installs, better known as ESXi Kickstart. Previously, they had relied on using a custom syslinux boot menu to be able to select a specific Kickstart configuration file that resided locally on a bootable ESXi Image (USB, ISO or CDROM) as a PXE/DHCP environment was not allowed in their environment. There was a small change to how ESXi boot files were reference between ESXi 4.x and ESXi 5.x/6.x and a new boot.cfg configuration is now used which I had written about here with respect to scripted installs when ESXi 5.0 was first released.

Luckily, even with these changes one can still use a custom menu with ESXi 5.x/6.x and be able to select a specific Kickstart configurations based on user input. Here is a screenshot example of a custom ESXi Image that I built providing three different install options that could be selected which would map to three different Kickstart configurations which can be either local to the boot media or can also be retrieved remotely.

bootable-esxi-image-with-multiple-kickstart-option
The first thing you should be aware of if you plan to boot the custom ESXi Image from local media such as USB, CDROM or ISO is that the path to the Kickstart file must be in all UPPER CASE which is mentioned in this VMware KB 1026373. The next caveat that I found in my testing is that if you plan to store the local Kickstart files inside of a directory within the ESXi Image, the name of the directory can not be too long. I would recommend using "ks" as "kickstart" apparently was too long.

After you have extracted the contents of an ESXi ISO which you have downloaded, you will want to create a root directory called "ks" which will contain the different Kickstart configuration files. Here is an example of what structure look like:

ks
├── ks1.cfg
├── ks2.cfg
└── ks3.cfg

Next, you will need to edit the isolinux.cfg file which comes by default within the ESXi ISO. This is where you will add the different Kickstart options that a user will be able to select from. In this first example, we will look at referencing the Kickstart files locally on the media which can be either USB or CDROM and you will need to ensure you specify the right boot option as shown here in the VMware documentation. The path to the Kickstart file needs to be appended to the line that contains boot.cfg reference and you must ensure you include "+++" at the end of that line.

Here is an example of referencing a Kickstart file that lives on a USB device under this path /ks/ks.cfg:

APPEND -c boot.cfg ks=usb:/KS/KS.CFG +++

Here is an example of my isolinux.cfg for the boot menu that I have shown above which provides three different options mapping to three different Kickstart configuration files:

DEFAULT menu.c32
MENU TITLE vGhetto Custom ESXi 6.0 Boot Menu
NOHALT 1
PROMPT 0
TIMEOUT 80
LABEL Ghetto Install
  KERNEL mboot.c32
  APPEND -c boot.cfg ks=cdrom:/KS/KS1.CFG +++
  MENU LABEL ^1 Ghetto Install
LABEL A bit More Ghetto Install
  KERNEL mboot.c32
  APPEND -c boot.cfg ks=cdrom:/KS/KS2.CFG +++
  MENU LABEL ^2 A bit More Ghetto Install
LABEL Super Ghetto ESXi Install
  KERNEL mboot.c32
  APPEND -c boot.cfg ks=cdrom:/KS/KS3.CFG +++
  MENU LABEL ^3 Super Ghetto ESXi Install
LABEL hddboot
  LOCALBOOT 0x80
  MENU LABEL ^Boot from local disk

As I mentioned earlier, the Kickstart configuration file can either be retrieved locally or it can also be retireved remotely using one of the following supported protocols: http, https, ftp & nfs as shown here in the VMware documentation.

Here is an example of isolinux.cfg for a boot menu which references both a local kickstart as well as one that remotely lives on a web server:

DEFAULT menu.c32
MENU TITLE vGhetto Custom ESXi 6.0 Boot Menu
NOHALT 1
PROMPT 0
TIMEOUT 80
LABEL Ghetto Install
  KERNEL mboot.c32
  APPEND -c boot.cfg ks=cdrom:/KS/KS1.CFG +++
  MENU LABEL ^1 Ghetto Install
LABEL A bit More Ghetto Install
  KERNEL mboot.c32
  APPEND -c boot.cfg ks=http://172.30.0.108/ks/ks2.cfg +++
  MENU LABEL ^2 A bit More Ghetto Install
LABEL Super Ghetto ESXi Install
  KERNEL mboot.c32
  APPEND -c boot.cfg ks=http://172.30.0.108/ks/ks3.cfg +++
  MENU LABEL ^3 Super Ghetto ESXi Install
LABEL hddboot
  LOCALBOOT 0x80
  MENU LABEL ^Boot from local disk

For additional ESXi Kickstart resources and example, be sure to check out my pages here.

Configuring VCSA 6.0 as vSphere Web Client Server for vSphere 5.5

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The vSphere 6.0 Web Client has been greatly improved with the release of vSphere 6.0 which includes a number of performance and UX enhancements. If you are interested in some of the details, be sure to check out this blog post by Dennis Lu, Product Manager of the vSphere Web Client. To really get the best possible user experience and to take advantage of all the new performance enhancements, it is recommend that you upgrade your entire vSphere environment which includes vCenter Server to vSphere 6.0. Having said that, I know this may not be possible for everyone immediately and it will take some time depending on your organizations software upgrade cycles and procedures, qualifications, burn in time, comfort left, etc. with vSphere 6.0 before completely moving over.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have seen quite a few requests from customers who have expressed interest in being able to just use the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client with their existing vSphere 5.5 environment as they make their transition over to vSphere 6.0. I can definitely understand where these customers are coming from and honestly, the vSphere Web Client should just be that, a UI Client. We should be able to decouple it from vCenter Server and be able to iterate on it based on feedback from our customers and partners. I did some investigation and I actually discovered that we in fact support something called Mixed-Version Transitional Environment in vCenter Server for Windows Upgrade. This is a bit of a mouth full but basically you can have a hybrid vCenter Server environment that consists of both vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 as you upgrade to full a full vSphere 6.0 environment.

I spent a couple of days researching this topic a bit more to see if I can come up with a solution that would ideally reduce number of changes introduced to a customers existing vSphere 5.5 environment while being able to leverage the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client. After many discussions, prototyping, snapshot reverts and with the help of one of my good GSS buddy G. Blair Fritz, we have come up with a very cool solution using the VCSA 6.0 as a "thin" vSphere 6.0 Web Client Server. The overall goal is to provide a period of time in which customers can use the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client with their existing vSphere 5.5 environment and when the time comes for a complete vSphere 6.0 upgrade, this "thin" vSphere 6.0 Web Client can be decommissioned and removed.

Disclaimer: Though this hybrid configuration is supported, using the VCSA as a "thin" vSphere Web Client Server is not officially supported. Please use at your own risk. It is still recommended that you upgrade your existing vSphere 5.5 environment to vSphere 6.0 as soon as possible to get the full benefits of the enhancements made to the vSphere 6.0 Web Client.

Requirements:

  • vSphere 5.5 running Windows using an External SSO Server
  • At least one vCenter Server 5.5 pointing to the External SSO Server

Here is the high level workflow as well as a diagram to help you visualize the process:

  • Step 1 - Upgrade your external SSO from vSphere 5.5 to new PSC 6.0
  • Step 2 - Deploy VCSA 6.0 and configure it to point the newly upgraded PSC 6.0
  • Step 3 - Running a configuration script within the VCSA 6.0 to optimize it as a "thin" vSphere Web Client Server

vsphere-6-web-client-with-vsphere-5.5-0
In my test environment, I have deployed a vCenter Server 5.5 which points to an external SSO (also running vSphere 5.5).

Step 1 - The first step is to upgrade the SSO server to the new PSC 6.0, you will follow the existing procedure by mounting the ISO and going through the guided installation. At this point, you can continue logging into the existing vSphere 5.5 Web Client and access your vCenter Server and its hosts and VMs.

Step 2 - Next, you will need to deploy a new Embedded VCSA 6.0 using either the Guided or Scripted Installation. You will need to make sure that it is joining to an existing SSO Domain by specifying the upgraded Windows PSC that you performed in step one. The SSO Domain Name should be vsphere.local as this was not a configurable option in earlier vSphere releases. At this point, you can now login to the VCSA 6.0 which provides the vSphere 6.0 Web Client but you will notice that you only see an empty inventory of the new vCenter Server 6.0 as well as an error message stating "Login failed due to invalid credentials for one or more vCenter Server systems"

vsphere-6-web-client-with-vsphere-5.5-1
The reason for this is that you need to restart the vpxd service on your vCenter Server 5.5 for it to be visible in the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client.

Note: It is important that if your external PSC is joined to an Active Directory Domain that you ensure the NTP Server specified in the VCSA 6.0 deployment also points to the same AD Server for the time source to be synchronized else you will run into problems later.

Step 3 - Login to your vCenter Server 5.5 and restart the vCenter Server service using the Services utility.

Step 4 - Once the vCenter Server service has restarted, you can now open a browser to the Hostname/IP Address of the VCSA 6.0 and you will see both vCenter Servers. You can now manage your vSphere 5.5 environment using the vSphere 6.0 Web Client.

vsphere-6-web-client-with-vsphere-5.5-2
I was pretty happy when I got this solution working but I was still not content. The smallest deployment size for an Embedded VCSA requires 8GB of memory, which is still a considerable amount of resources in my opinion. I wanted to optimize it further by turning off unnecessary services, modify the memory requirements for the unused services as well as un-registering the vCenter Server 6.0 endpoint so that you only see your vSphere 5.5 vCenter Servers only. Surprisingly, this took up the bulk of our research to figure out what could be turned off, how to properly turn it off and then un-registering the VC endpoint.

I have created the following shell script called setup_vcsa_as_webclient_client.sh which needs to be uploaded to the VCSA (need to enable Bash shell on the VCSA). The following three variables must be updated prior to running:

  • PSC_SERVER - The Hostname/IP Address of your external PSC
  • SSO_USERNAME - The SSO Administrator account
  • SSO_PASSWORD - The SSO Administrator password

Once everything completes successfully, you should turn off your VCSA and modify the memory from 8GB to 3GB. From my limited amount of testing, the overall memory utilization was sitting around ~2-2.5GB of memory, so I think configuring it to 3GB should be plenty and you can always adjust accordingly. Since we have disabled all the unnecessary services, the VCSA boot time should be pretty quick and now when you login to the vSphere Web Client, you should only see your vSphere 5.5 vCenter Servers and nothing else.

vsphere-6-web-client-with-vsphere-5.5-3
When the time comes and you are ready to fully upgrade your vSphere 5.5 environment to vSphere 6.0, you can decommission and remove this "thin" vSphere Web Client Server by following the procedure outlined in this VMware KB 2106736. I think it would be really nice to be able to update the vSphere Web Client outside of updating vCenter Server and truly providing a "client" that is decoupled. What do you think?

Standalone VMRC now available for Mac OS X

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Last year, a standalone Virtual Machine Remote Console (VMRC) was released for Windows as part of vSphere 5.5 Update 2b which provides an alternative way of launching the VM console due to NPAPI deprecation. There was of course a huge request for Mac OS X support and the VMRC team has been working hard and today I am please to announce that standalone VMRC is now available for Apple Mac OS X which you can download using the following URL: www.vmware.com/go/download-vmrc

Note: Mac OS X 10.8 or greater is required to use the new Standalone VMRC. The release notes will be updated to reflect this requirement

There are currently two methods of launching a remote console to a Virtual Machine using the vSphere Web Client as seen in the screenshot below:

  1. Using HTML5 VMRC simply by clicking on the thumbnail preview
  2. Using the new Standalone VMRC by clicking on the "Launch Remote Console" link

vmrc-mac-osx-2
When using the Standalone VMRC method, instead of opening the VM console in the browser, it will launch the native VMRC application on your system whether that be Windows or Mac OS X. All basic functionalities of the Standalone VMRC is available as you would expect such as power operations, device management, etc.

Note: There is not a specific version of vSphere that is required to directly launch the Standalone VMRC. However, to launch it within the vSphere Web Client, you will need vSphere 5.5 Update 2b or greater.

vmrc-mac-osx-1
The other great thing about the Standalone VMRC is that it can function without vCenter Server and the vSphere Web Client and you can actually use it to connect to VM directly on an ESXi host. To use the VMRC without the vSphere Web Client, you will need to construct the VMRC URI which looks like the following:

vmrc://clone:[TICKET]@[HOST]:[PORT]/?moid=[VM-MOREF]

where TICKET is obtained by calling the AcquireCloneTicket() method using the SessionManager in vCenter Server. The HOST will either be the Hostname/IP Address of vCenter Server and the PORT should be default to 443 and you will need to specify the VM MoRef ID. In the case of a standalone ESXi host, you would just change the HOST property. If you do not wish to use the clone ticket, you can also just provide the following URI which will prompt for your ESXi credentials

vmrc://@[HOST]:[PORT]/?moid=[VM-MOREF]

Once you have generated the VMRC URI, you MUST launch it through a web browser as that is how it is passed directly to the Standalone VMRC application. In my opinion, this is not ideal especially for customers who wish to automatically generate this as part of a VM provisioning workflow to their end users and not having to require a browser to launch the Standalone VMRC application. If you have some feedback on this, please do leave a comment.

In the mean time, a quick workaround is to use the "open" command on Mac OS X along with the VMRC URI which will automatically load it into your default browser and launch the Standalone VMRC application for you.

open 'vmrc://clone:cst-VCT-52e44ad7-712f-9f45-a9ee-13ec6a74acaf--tp-B1-6F-91-F6-B5-8F-80-E5-FD-D6-E1-8B-10-F7-FE-15-C5-2A-75-41@192.168.1.60:443/?moid=vm-18'

UPDATE (05/31/15) - If you are connecting directly to an ESXi host you can either use the vSphere API to query for the VM MoRef ID or you can easily pull it by running the following command directly in the ESXi Shell:

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

I am sure there are probably a few of you asking, what about for Linux users? Well, you can probably guess what is being worked on next 😉