Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

auto-deploy

Fling: Auto Deploy GUI

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Many of you probably know the PXE Manager fling which Max Daneri created… Max has been working on something really cool, a brand new fling: Auto Deploy GUI! I had the pleasure of test driving the GUI and providing early feedback to Max when he had just started working on it and since then it has come a long way! It is a great and useful tool which I hope will at some point be part of vCenter. Once again, great work Max! I suggest that all of you check out this excellent fling and provide Max with feedback so that he can continue to develop and improve it.

The Auto-Deploy GUI fling is an 8MB download and allows you to configure auto-deploy without the need to use PowerCLI. It comes with a practical deployment guide which is easy to follow and should allow all of you to test this in your labs! Download it it now and get started!

source
The Auto Deploy GUI is a vSphere plug-in for the VMware vSphere Auto Deploy component. The GUI plug-in allows a user to easily manage the setup and deployment requirements in a stateless environment managed by Auto Deploy. Some of the features provided through the GUI include the ability to add/remove Depots, list/create/modify Image Profiles, list VIB details, create/modify rules to map hosts to Image Profiles, check compliance of hosts against these rules and re-mediate hosts.

Creating an Image Profile without manually downloading a bundle! (stateless ESXi)

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Just like the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with stateless ESXi. I’ve downloaded multiple ESXi bundles / depots and remembered that there was an easier way of creating an Image Profile.  The image profiles are also available as part of an online depot at vmware.com. So I figured I would start using that one instead of downloading the bundle manually every single time. It is fairly simple to add the online source as a depot:

Add-EsxSoftwareDepot -DepotUrl https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

If you would do a “Get-EsxImageProfile” next you would see all image profiles (see screenshot below) which are part of the depot.

Now you could even compare the two image profiles which would tell you if the image profiles are equal and which VIB has changed. In this case it is one of the primary VIBs “esx-base”:

Compare-EsxImageProfile ESXi-5.0.0-469512-no-tools ESXi-5.0.0-20110904001-notools

Equal               : False
PackagesEqual       : False
RefAcceptanceLevel  : PartnerSupported
CompAcceptanceLevel : PartnerSupported
OnlyInRef           : {}
OnlyInComp          : {}
UpgradeFromRef      : {VMware_bootbank_esx-base_5.0.0-0.3.474610}
DowngradeFromRef    : {}

If you figure by now that all this PowerCLI stuff is not your cup of tea I would like to suggest to check out Alan Renouf’s brand new PowerPack. Alan has GUI’fied the most common tasks which will enable you to click and point instead.

Patching your Image Profile (stateless ESXi)

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The first patch for ESXi has been released so I figured this was a great time to create and article around how to patch your Image Profile with a new update. The process is fairly straight forward as in this case you will need to create a new image-profile (described here) and link it to a new rule (New-DeployRule and make that rule active (Add-DeployRule). That is what I like about Stateless. You can just prepare a new Image Profile, create a new rule and you are good to go. A reboot of your ESXi host will load up the latest Image Profile. I did this within a couple of minutes and I’m now running build 474610 of ESXi.

While I was playing around I decided to do things in an incorrect order to see if I could break it, and of course I did manage to break it… I managed to fix all of it though. The first thing I did was testing the rule set and repairing it as documented below.

Now if you run into any issues you can repair the ruleset by using the following command:

Get-VMHost <esxi host> | Test-DeployRuleSetCompliance | Repair-DeployRuleSetCompliance

Now if your host boots and mentions that there’s no rule associated you might want to try the following:

Get-DeployRule

If your newly created rule is returned you will want to make sure it is active:

Get-DeployRuleSet

If there’s nothing listed it means no rules are currently active (active ruleset is what the documentation will refer to). You you can set the rule as active as follows:

Set-DeployRuleSet -DeployRule <name of rule>

Everyone who is considering using Auto-Deploy I would most definitely recommend to explore these commands and to try to break things and fix it. Document your steps along the way, I am certain it will be valuable at some point!

Stripping your Stateless image

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I was just playing around with Stateless again, aka auto-deploy, and I was wondering how far I could strip the image down to the bare minimum and what the difference would be. I loaded the standard software depot and cloned an existing image profile to a new image profile, for more details on how to do this check the post I published a couple of days ago. I figured I would export this newly create image profiles first so I could see the size of the bundle when exported. I cloned and exported the “ESXi-5.0.0-469512-no-tools” image profile and checked the details:

ESXiStateless.zip 137,869 KB

Now the first thing to do was figuring out which VIBs were part of this image profile, you can do this fairly simple by using the command below. Note that I exported the results to a CSV file just to make it easier if I would need to add VIBs later:

Get-EsxImageProfile <image profile name>  | Select-Object -ExpandProperty VibList | Select name | export-csv c:\tmp\VIBs.csv

Now this returns the full list of all the VIBs in a CSV file with just the names of the VIBs. There are 2 core VIBs (esx-base and esx-tboot) which are required for booting. I also kept the e1000 VIB as I knew I needed it. The e1000 VIB requires the “misc-drivers” VIB so I was left with 4 VIBs:

esx-base
esx-tboot
e1000
misc-drivers

Stripping the rest of the VIBs is fairly simple. Note that you will need to replace <image profile name> with the actual name of your image profile and <package name> with the name of the package you would like to remove:

Remove-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile <image profile name> -SoftwarePackage <package name>

So I stripped it completely and exported the image profile again and this was the result:

Thinner.zip 131,457 KB

Note that you can actually check which VIBs are part of your image profile, which is what I used to validate I removed all unnecesarry VIBs:

Get-esximageprofile <image profile name> | Select-Object -ExpandProperty VibList

That is a whopping 6MB shaved off! (By the way this is without the HA-Agent. The size of the completely stripped image profile with the HA agent is 143,679KB) Was it a useful exercise? Yes it was as it helped me understanding the process a lot better… Is it useful to strip all the drivers from your image profile? No it is not, you will only save 6MB which is close to nothing compared to the overall size of 131 MB. I did manage to boot the image correctly, but once again there’s really no point from a memory perspective to go through this exercise.

The thing that does make a huge difference is using the no-tools image profile, but there is a serious implication. When you do not include VMware Tools you will need to have a different mechanism for distributing VMware Tools which will probably complicate things from an operational perspective. I guess you will need to decide if the reduction in MBs is worth the effort and is worth the risk of having a “1 of a kind” environment. I know I will keep it vanilla from now on,

 

Cheat sheet – Auto deploy

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When I finished my article about auto deploy I figured it was really lengthy and wanted to write down the bare minimum which can be used as a quick cheat sheet when setting up auto-deploy. Of course you will need to install vCenter, PowerCLI, Auto-Deploy and TFTP first, but I am guessing most of you will know how to do that. Here’s what you will need to do when you have all of the requirements up and running:

  1. Add-EsxSoftwareDepot c:\tmp\VMware-Esxi-5.0.0-<buildnumber>-depot.zip
  2. Add-EsxSoftwareDepot http://<vcenter server>/vSphere-HA-depot
  3. New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile "ESXi-5.0.0-<buildnumber>-standard" -name "ESXiStatelessImage"
  4. Add-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile "ESXiStatelessImage" -SoftwarePackage vmware-fdm
  5. New-DeployRule -Name "FirstBoot" -Item "ESXiStatelessImage" -AllHosts
  6. Add-DeployRule -DeployRule "FirstBoot"
  7. Boot one of the hosts
  8. Configure the host
  9. Create Host Profile based on “first host” named “ESXiHostProfile”
  10. New-DeployRule -name "ProductionBoot" -item "ESXiStatelessImage", ESXiHostProfile, <target_cluster> -Pattern "vendor=<unique hw identifier>"
  11. Add-DeployRule -DeployRule "ProductionBoot"
  12. Remove-DeployRule -DeployRule FirstBoot -delete
  13. Boot all hosts
  14. Assign Host Profiles to all hosts
  15. Provide the “user input” aka create an Answer File per host
  16. Reboot hosts –> done
  17. Before you leave your PowerCLI session make sure you save your newly create image profile as a Software Depot so you can make changes later if and when needed! Otherwise the data will be saved in your image profile cache but you will not be able to make changes!
    Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile "ESXiStatelessImage" -ExportToBundle -FilePath c:\tmp\ESXiStatelessImage.zip

That seems a bit more simplistic than my previous post doesn’t it.

 

** update: added step 17 **