vSphere 6.5 – Page 17

How to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 running on VMware Fusion & Workstation?

10.27.2016 by William Lam // 31 Comments

As with any new release of vSphere, it is quite common for customers to deploy the new software in either a vSphere home or test lab to get more familiar with it. Although not everyone has access to a vSphere lab environment, the next best thing is to leverage either VMware Fusion or Workstation. With the upcoming release of vSphere 6.5, this is no different. In fact, during the vSphere Beta program, this was something that was asked about by several customers and something I had helped document as the process has changed from previous releases of the VCSA.

In vSphere 6.5, the VCSA deployment has changed from a "Single" monolithic stage where a user enters all of their information up front and the installer goes and deploys the VCSA OVA and then applies the configurations. If you had fat finger say a DNS entry or wanted to change the IP Address before applying the actual application configurations, it would not be possible and you would have to re-deploy which was not an ideal user experience.

In vSphere 6.5, the new UI installer will still allow you to perform a "Single" monolithic stage but it is now broken down into two distinct stages as shown below with their respective screenshots:

Stage 1 - Initial OVA deployment which includes basic networking

Stage 2 - Applying VCSA specific personality configuration

Just like in prior releases of the VCSA, the UI translates the user input into specific OVF properties which are then passed into the VCSA guest for configuration. This means that if you wish to deploy VCSA 6.5 running Fusion or Workstation, you will have two options to select from. You either deploy VCSA and complete both Stage 1 and 2 or just Stage 1 only. If you select the latter option, to complete the actual deployment, you will need to open a web browser to the VAMI UI (https://[VCSA-IP]:5480) and finish configuring the VCSA using the "Setup vCenter Server Appliance" option as shown in the screenshot below.

If your goal is to quickly get the VCSA 6.5 up and running, then going with Option 1 (Stage 1 & 2 Config) is the way to go. If your goal is to learn about the new VCSA UI Installer, then you can at least get a taste of that by going with Option 2 (Stage 1 Config) and this way you can step through Stage 2 using the native UI installer.

One last thing I would like to mention is that there have been a number of new services added to the VCSA 6.5. One example is that vSphere Update Manager (VUM) is now embedded in the VCSA and it is also enabled by default. With these new services, the tiniest deployment size is going to require 10GB of memory where as before it was 8GB. This is something to be aware of and ensure that you have adequate resources before attempting to deploy the VCSA or else you may see some unexpected failures while the system is being configured.

Note: If you have access to fast SSDs and would like to overcommit memory in Fusion or Workstation, you might be able to get this to work leveraging some tricks mentioned here. This is not something I have personally tested, so YMMV.

Here are the steps to deploy VCSA 6.5 using either VMware Fusion or Workstation:

Step 0 (Optional) - Familiarize yourself with setting up VCSA 6.0 was on Fusion/Workstation with this blog post which will be helpful for additional context.

Step 1 - Download & extract the VCSA 6.5 ISO

Step 2 - Import the VCSA OVA which will be located in vcsa/VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6.5.0.5100-XXXXXX_OVF10.ova using either VMware Fusion or Workstation (you can either double click or just go to File->Open) but make sure you do NOT power it on after deployment. (this is very important)

Step 4 - Locate the directory in which the VCSA was deployed to and open up the VMX file and append one of the following options (make sure to change the IP information and passwords based on your environment):

Option 1 (Stage 1 & 2 Configuration):

guestinfo.cis.deployment.node.type = "embedded"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr.family = "ipv4"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.mode = "static"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.pnid = "192.168.1.190"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr = "192.168.1.190"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.prefix = "24"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.gateway = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.dns.servers = "192.168.1.1"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.passwd = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.ssh.enabled = "True"
guestinfo.cis.deployment.autoconfig = "True"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.ntp.servers = "pool.ntp.org"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.password = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.site-name = "virtuallyGhetto"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.domain-name = "vsphere.local"
guestinfo.cis.ceip_enabled = "False"

Option 2 (Stage 1 Only Configuration):

Step 5 - Once you have saved your changes, go ahead and power on the VCSA. At this point, the guestinfo properties that you just added will be read in by VMware Tools as the VCSA is booting up and the configuration will begin. Depending on the speed of your hardware, this can potentially take up to 15min+ as I have seen it. Please be patient with the process. If you wish to check the progress of the deployment, you can open a browser to https://[VC-IP]:5480 and you should see some progress or you can periodically connect to the Hostname/IP Address and once it is done, you should be taken to the vCenter Server's main landing page.

Virtual NVMe and Nested ESXi 6.5?

10.26.2016 by William Lam // 4 Comments

After publishing my Nested ESXi enhancements for vSphere 6.5 article, I had received a number of questions on whether the new Virtual NVMe (vNVMe) capability introduced in the upcoming vSphere 6.5 release would also work with a Nested ESXi VM? The answer is yes, similiar to PVSCSI and VMXNET3, we also have an NVMe driver for ESXi running in VM.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

To consume the new vNVMe for a Nested ESXi VM, you will need to use the latest ESXi 6.5 and later compatibility (vHW 13). Once that has been done, you can then add the a new NVMe Controller to your Nested ESXi VM and then assign that to one of the virtual disks as shown in the screenshot below.

Next, you would install ESXi 6.5 as you normally would and the NVMe controller will automatically be detected and driver will be loaded. In the example below, you can see I only have a single disk which ESXi itself is installed on and it is backed by the NVMe Controller.

One of the biggest benefit of using an NVMe interface over the traditional SCSI is that it can significantly reduce the amount of overhead compared to the SCSI protocol which in turn consumes less CPU cycles as well as reducing the overall amount of IO latency for your VM workloads. Obviously, when using it inside of a Nested ESXi VM, YMMV but hopefully you should also see an improvement there as well. For those who plan to give this a try in their environment, it would be good to hear what type of use cases you might have in mind for this and if you have any feedback (good/bad), feel free to leave a comment.

How to run a Docker Container on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5?

10.24.2016 by William Lam // 8 Comments

One of the most notable changes in the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) in vSphere 6.5 is a switch of the underlying OS from SLES to VMware's very own Photon OS. With this change, VMware will now own the entire software stack within the VCSA (OS + Application). This will allow VMware to quickly respond and deliver OS and security updates to customers at a much quicker rate than it was possible before.

During my testing of the VCSA, I had a need to spin up a Docker Container. Given that the VCSA is now Photon OS based, this should be a pretty trivial thing to enable as it is with a standalone installation of Photon OS. After a bit of trial/error, I found what was needed to get this working on the VCSA. Before jumping into the solution, I should say that this is really for lab and educational purposes. In general, I would NOT recommend installing additional software on the VCSA, not only is this NOT supported by VMware but you may also potentially be impacting your vCenter Server by taking resources away from the main application. It is possible to constrain the amount of resources (CPU/Memory) allocated to the Docker Container, please refer to this resource for more information.

For smaller customers, the argument is that I can just run everything on a single system but in reality there are many benefits to having a separate management VM which can be Photon OS or any other OS that your organization supports. You can install additional management tools/scripts and you would not be artificially limited by the VCSA's environment which is really locked down to what is absolutely needed to run the vCenter Server application and its services.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

Given that PowerCLI Core (Linux and Mac OS X) was just recently released, which also includes a Docker Container, I figure this would be a nice example to start with as I know a few of you have asked about this possibility 🙂

Step 1 - Install Docker by running the following command (you will need access to the internet either direct or proxy access from the VCSA)

tdnf -y install docker

Step 2 - Load the following kernel module which will allow us to start the Docker client by running the following command:

insmod /usr/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/net/bridge/bridge.ko

Note: The above command does not persist across reboots. If you would like to persist this configuration, please refer to the instructions at the very bottom.

Step 3 - Enable and start the Docker Client by running the following command:

systemctl enable docker
systemctl start docker

Step 4 - Pull down the PowerCLI Core Docker Image from Docker Hub by running the following command:

docker pull vmware/powerclicore

Step 5 - Start the PowerCLI Core Docker Container by running the following command:

docker run --rm -it --entrypoint='/usr/bin/powershell' vmware/powerclicore

As you can see from the screenshot above, you now have PowerShell and the PowerCLI module loaded running as a Docker Container on the VCSA 🙂 You can apply this to any Docker Container that you have created or pulling it directly from Docker Hub. If you prefer to build the PowerCLI Core Docker Container from the Dockerfile, you simply just need to download and extract the PowerCLI Core zip file onto the VCSA and then run the following command:

docker build -t vmware/powercli .

How to persist bridge module load across reboots:

Step 1 - Edit /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf and remove the "install bridge /bin/false" entry.

Step 2 - Create a new file called /etc/modules-load.d/bridge.conf which contains the word "bridge" (no quotes). When the system boots up, it will iterate through all the module configuration file and load the respective modules. The bridge module is what is needed to start the Docker Daemon.