Archive for the ‘Ultimate-DA’ Category

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
As with all scripted installations – there is a potential to clobber LUNs on your FC-SAN. Please engage brain first before using the UDA (or any scripted installer for that matter!)

MANY THANKS TO CARL THIJSSEN FOR ALL HIS HARDWORK!

MANY PEOPLE THINK ITS ME THAT’S THE BRAINS BEHIND THE UDA. THEY ARE WRONG. I’M JUST AN ENTHUSIASTIC SUPPORTER OF HIS WORK!

With the release of vSphere5 today it my pleasure to announce that Carl Thijssen has once again come up trumps. He’s worked on a upgrade package to the UDA 2.0 that support ESX5i. It shouldn’t take long to download the patch as Carl was able to add ESX5i with just 225KB with of changes to the core build…

At some stage I think Carl might make a new build of the UDA which includes this patch for new users – but remember ESXi is only ONE of Carl’s supported OSes, so for him the decision to create a new build (a UDA 3.0) is based on much bigger factors than just one vendor alone….

To be honest I’ve not done much work with deploying ESXi to disk with PXE. But it was a pleasant surprise to find that Carl’s upgrade package worked right away without a problem. Of course I had to make some changes to my old kickstart “Service Console” templates – because not everything the ESX “Classic” supported, is achieved in the same way…. I guess the real question facing early adopters of ESXi is how they are going to deploy the new edition of ESX. There’s plethora of choices:

• Don’t use UDA, but use VMware’s new “Auto Deploy” feature which allows for a stateless/diskless PXE boot of the VMKernel itself. Great. But auto deploy is an Enterprize+ feature, and is recommended to be used with Host Profiles (another Enterprize+ feature)
• Use something like the UDA or EDA to get the software on a disk… and then:

• Do the “post-configuration” phase with the UDA template/sub-template feature OR
• Use PowerCLI to configure the host.

In my new book (Hotel California) my character Maverick does all three – so he can evaluate the pros/cons of all the methods to his boss at Corp, Inc.

Anyway, to download the upgrade build bundle click the link below:

http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/uda-2.0.20.tgz

If your new to the UDA you will need the core virtual appliance also: http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/downloads/uda20-build17.ova.zip

That’s the edition that is an OVA format, suitable for importing into vSphere – the “Workstation” edition is over on Carl’s site here: http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/download.html

Folks coming to my webpage for the “ESX” version (in a OVA format designed for importing into vSphere) will find the same .tgz bundle on my site under the UDA page.

Additionally I have some sample “Advanced Templates” and a sample “Sub-Templates” that I’ve tested against ESX5i throughout the beta and RC and now the GA. In case you don’t know the “template” stores the instructions used to install ESX5i, and the “sub-template” holds all your variables (IP, hostnames etc)

Template Bundle

The Uber vSwitch example creates a single vSwitch0, uplinks all the VMNICs, and then adds portgroups. It then uses NIC standby orders to make sure that stuff like IP storage traffic prefers not to be on your vMotion network. Whereas the Standard vSwitch creates a series of vSwitchs (vSwitch0, vSwitch1) and so on for each type of traffic.

These scripts aren’t perfect. There’s three problems I have:

• Management traffic is NOT being an able on the HA-Heartbeat portgroup
• SSH is not starting
• NTP is configured but the service is not starting.
• There’s a prize for someone who can tell me how to fix all 3…

These are SAMPLES. They contain IP address and NFS exports that will simple NOT work in your environment. The idea is to use them as the starting point…

MANY THANKS TO CARL FOR ALL HIS HARDWORK!

PLEASE REPORT BUGS AND SLUGS TO THE VMWARE FORUM. NEITHER I OR CARL ARE VMWARE SUPPORT. OK?

My pal, Carl over at ultimatedeployment.org has been busy. He’s built a brand new version of the UDA that now supports ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1 installable…

I’ve updated the files he has and converted them in the format that ESX recognises and bundled them in the .OVA format (albeit in zip file) first.

You can find the new build of the UDA on the welcome page. Alternatively, if you want to run the UDA under VMware Workstation – visit Carl’s website.

Well, that isn’t really very true. It’s not very new at all. It’s been available on Carl’s www.ultimatedeployment.org website for AGES! And I have been just to goddamn lazy to bring it over into the ESX format, and package it up as an OVA file – for easy importing. Carl has been a busy bee, because the last time I looked at the UDA it didn’t support ESX3i/4i. But now it does!

What inspired me to get off my fat lazy ass and do this. Well, I’m looking at the ESXi 4.1 deployment process and seeing if Carl needs to do any more work. So I hope with Carl’s help (he’s the brains behind the operation, I’m just his lackey), we can have the UDA ready to support ESXi 4.1 when it ships!

Download the latest version of the UDA here, together with a sample template & subtemplate…

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/vmware-content/ultimate-da/

Most of the time I want to have completely scripted installation of ESX3/4 without having to touch a physical server except for press F12 and doing it through the PXE boot appliance – the UDA…

For some time I’ve been using UDA 2.0 in its beta format to install ESX4 in unattended fashion. But occasionally I want to do a manual installation. My problem is all my boxes have CDs, not DVD players. Also the virtual media method although is OK, it’s deadly slow.

Anyway, over on http://www.virtuallifestyle.nl, Joep Piscaer has show how can take the UDA – and just use it to do a PXE boot and use its web-service to deliver media – minus the script installation. Joep’s small edit presents you with an over-the-network installation using the full graphical installer.

http://www.virtuallifestyle.nl/2009/06/uda-2-0-with-a-twist/

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=366

Well, I’m pleased to announce that the new version of UDA is available. It’s beta, and some work has been done it to make it work ESX4. I will have a document available in the couple days (weeks?) time which will walk you thru the setup and configure to deploy ESX4 classic.

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/downloads/uda20.build2.zip

One method (amongst many) of stopping your SAN being “touched” by Anaconda installer is to remove the drivers that Anaconda uses for HBA’s. Dinny Davies wrote an article about this on the xtravirt.com website.

Link:

http://www.xtravirt.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=75&func=fileinfo&id=13

Fellow blogger, Bouke Groenescheij has taken this idea to next logical conclusion by writing a script that does it all for you.

Links:
http://www.jume.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=5
http://www.jume.nl

It is quite easy to reconfigure the UDA to patch your ESX host after the build process. All we need is NFS export on the UDA to act as repository for the patches, a free-patching script and call statement in the kickstart script. Here’s how I do it (of course, everyone has their own preferred script/method):

(more…)

I rebuild my systems very frequently – especially with testing the UDA to add new options to my %post scripts. One thing I like is if after pressing F12 and starting install is to close down the ILO on my HP servers – and have the kickstart script send me message when all the work is done.

(more…)

Update:
This post has changed. I replaced the dangerous rm -f -r /tmp/udasource with the safer rmdir /tmp/udasource 
This post has changed. I replaced the RW option with RO again

It is possible to script the installation of hardware management agents using the UDA as the source of the code, and the kickstart file to automate the installation. In this example I’ve scripted the installation of the HP Insight Management Agents mainly because that’s the hardware type I run on – however, these principles could be applied to other vendors hardware agents. Personally, I don’t possess any IBM Hardware or any modern Dell hardware to create a similiar script and then test it properly. I would like someone (using the exactly the same method below for consistency) to validate/document the process for IBM/Dell servers. This way I can give this sample code to Carl (the developer of the UDA) as templates from which he can automate this manual process for the next UDA release. I hoping that Carl will be able to write an upload, extract and edit function to the UDA.

Step One: First enable NFS on the UDA

(more…)

You might find you have problems creating local VMFS volumes using the UDA’s partition tool. This affects many systems specifically HP servers. VMware KB 8577703 acknowledges the problem:

“During an ESX Server 3.0.1 scripted installation on SCSI controllers that use the cciss driver, VMFS3 volumes might not be correctly created. To address this issue, ensure the entry for the volume is listed in the /etc/vmware/vmfs3queue. This entry indicates that the VMFS volume will be formatted and created upon reboot of the ESX Server system.”

There is a simplier work-around using vmkfstools. Here is an example…

(more…)