Ultimate-DA

Ultimate Deployment Appliance 2.0 BETA (UDA) by Carl Thijssen

UDA 2.0 is the new version of the popular PXE Boot appliance that can be used deploy ESX amongst other operating systems. UDA 2.0 support ESX4. There are many new features including the ability to support multiple versions of ESX. One of the major new features is a new method of creating kickstart scripts. Rather than for every 20 servers you having 20 kickstart scripts – now there is one “master” template which contains plain text commands and [variables] for many ESX hosts – together with a subtemplate that holds those variable for each ESX host. The result is all you have to do is modify just one configuration file to affect the change across many ESX hosts. You can define whatever variables you like and have any number of variables you desire.
The UDA ships as either virtual disks in a .zip file or in the new .OVF format.
There are some sample templates and subtemplate files here – the contents of these can be copy & pasted to to “edit” boxes when you create a new template or subtemplate.
Finally, I’ve written a quick start guide to using the UDA 2.0 (BETA)
Note: Below are files of the previous versions of the UDA. You welcome to download and use them as you wish. Remember UDA 1.x.x does NOT support ESX 4.

Ultimate Deployment Appliance 1.xx (UDA) by Carl Thijssen

Acknowledgement:
Firstly, I would like to thank Carl Thijssen for his work. UDA is Carl’s brainchild and he does all this development work for free and in his own time.

Overview:

The UDA is a DHCP/TFTP/PXE appliance which comes with a web-based management tool which simplifies installing an operating system to either physical or virtual machines. Expressed very simply once the UDA is correctly configured (which does not take much time at all) via the web-management tool, the operator powers on the physical or virtual machine and press [F12] to trigger a PXE boot. The operator then selects a build from a menu, and then an unattended/scripted installation is triggered by either using either Windows unattended files or Linux kickstart files depending on your OS. UDA also supports using CD-ROM boot utilities such as BartPE delivered via PXE. In short UDA allows you kiss goodbye your manual CD-ROM based installations – and say hello to remote builds via ILO/RAC/IP-KVM cards or from your virtual machine console window.

My involvement with UDA began with version 1.3 which initially did not support VMware ESX. This said I was able to make UDA 1.3 deploy ESX 3.x.x by modifying one of Carl’s Fedora Core 5 templates. I was so impressed with UDA 1.3 that contacted the developer to add and improve support specifically for ESX 3.x.x. Although I worked closely with Carl Thijssen with improving and testing ESX support in UDA 1.4 it is important to know that Carl did 99.9% of the development work – and therefore Carl should take 100% of the credit for this outstanding contribution to VMware Community. I hope to work with Carl in future to improve UDA specifically in the area which interests me – which is deploying ESX 3.x.x to physical hardware.

New features specifically include:

  • A kickstart creator for ESX 3 which supports options to:
    • Install or Upgrade ESX
    • The ability to set which NIC is used for the ESX host installation
    • To hard-code kickstart scripts to ESX hosts by their MAC Address
    • Selective loading of network and storage drivers
    • Password protect the GRUB configuration
  • Locally stored ISOs which dispenses with the need for a File Server
  • Support for Linux NFS as well as a Windows Sharing
  • Custom “help text” to the user of the UDA

Community Support:

As with all community initiatives UDA is released without commercial support – it supports comes from the community that uses it and donations to its continued development is very much encouraged. A VMware Forum post has become the for now unofficial support page if you have problems with UDA. The forum post is located here:

Home » VMTN Discussion Forums » VMTN Solutions Area » Virtual Appliances » Ultimate Deployment Appliance

Carl has arranged a permanent home for UDA in the VMware Workstation format at www.ultimatedeployment.org

Getting Started:

I have written a brief “Getting started” guide to using the UDA specifically relating to deploying ESX 3.x.x to a physical machine.

Getting Started with UDA and ESX 3.x.x (PDF)

Download UDA 1.4 from these mirrors

The UDA come in two formats:

  • A VMware Workstation format for use on a laptop
    This version allows you to carry your UDA around with you from location to location. This contains a “base” version of UDA.
  • A VMware ESX 3.x.x format for use on a ESX host. This version allows you to run the UDA in your enterprise environment. This edition includes some sample kickstarts scripts created by myself which includes some scripting in the %post section of kickstart to manage such things as vSwitches creation, configuring the iSCSI Software Initiator, and configure NAS support. I use these sample scripts to regularly rebuild my Dell PowerEdge and HP Proliant Servers, and as such contain very specific information such as IP address that would only work without error in my development lab. The Dell script should work on IBM equipment but has not been tested on that hardware. The HP and Dell scripts contains specific references to HP hardware such as t
  • he Smart Raid Array Controller (CCISS) and /dev/sda. If you want these sample scripts to use in the VMware Workstation Edition of UDA they are downloadable from this page. My scripts assume that the UDAs IP address is 192.168.3.150. If you attempt to use my scripts you must modify the samples using the UDAs web-interface to reflect your IP settings. The scripts are released as samples only and should be heavily reviewed before modifying them for use in your production environment.
  • If you looking for my latest kickstart.CFG samples they I update them when I learn something new independently of the UDA. This means I don’t have to upload the whole of the UDA, just a couple of text files
  • As ever no warranty apply. Use at your own risk.

IMPORTANT:
In effort to keep networking distribution costs down a minimum please the links in the following order – Primary, Backup Link1 and Backup Link2 and so on. This is allows us to utilise “free” hosting providers first before using bandwidth which is paid for. I would encourage the use of some kind of “download manager” to ensure you get a complete copy of the file, and that you check your download with some type of md5sum tool.

Workstation Edition (ZIP)

md5sum: ea909baf9b9fbb809696be7741065ebd

ESX Server Edition (ZIP)

md5sum: 4ec323889eb2b6da07c9ef7c775667de

Lastest sample ESX 3.0.1 Kickstart Scripts (Last Update: 13th June 2007)

dell.cfg hp.cfg dlupg.cfg hpupg.cfg

*** New: Some simple sample ESX 2.x.x Kickstart Scripts

esx2.x.x-DELL.cfg esx2.x.x-HP.cfg

CAUTION:
It is not recommended to edit kickstart .cfg files using Microsoft Notepad. It will add unwanted line feeds (LF) to the file which may cause the kickstart file to misinterpreted. If you must use Microsoft Windows as your client OS use Microsoft Wordpad which does not modify the file in this way. Linux users are safe to use nano and vi as text editors.