Archive for the ‘Ultimate-DA’ Category

UDA 1.4 might not correctly set the right NIC for your Service Console network. This is by design, and the cause is the difference between the way Anaconda Install and the ESX vmkernel enumerate devices. The best way to assign the right is using the kickstart %post section.

You can remove the NIC for the Service Console with:

esxcfg-vswitch -U vmnic0 vSwitch0

and assign your preferred NIC with

esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic5 vSwitch0

Note:
The esxcfg command is case-sensitive. So -L and -U are in UPPER-CASE.

This week I have been the Netherlands teaching the VMware Authorised Vi3 course “Install and Configure”. I took the opportunity to meet up with Carl Thijssen – the creator of the UDA (the Ultimate Deployment Appliance). It was great to finally meet up with Carl, and to escape my awful hotel and its awful food!

We discussed the UDA, VMware and virtualisation generally – and chatted about the eternal problem of delivering computing environments to desktop end-users.

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UDA 1.4 is now completed mirrored on two servers. This mirror contains all the files for the UDA both in the Workstation and ESX formats. It also includes my PDF getting-started document and sample ESX 3.x.x files. This has been very kindly provided by Chris Hills of North East Worcestershire College, in the UK. The UDA is mirror on Chris’s personal website and also on JANET, the UK wide University & College internetwork.

Chris does a very nice line in pre-packaged VMware Virtual Machine containing many different Linux distributions including Fedora Core 7, GentOS and Debian. If your interest in Linux generally or Linux in a Virtual Machine its well work checking out.

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

Chris Hills Home Blog: http://chaz6.com/

If you are having problems with the UDA, it could be that you are experiencing more general network, NIC, DHCP or even physical switch problems. This would affect other PXE appliances like Alteris also. I found a very good round-up of typical Anaconda network problems here. You might find this help page useful too.

Link:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AnacondaNetworkIssues

I’ve just updated the sample kickstart scripts – to include two new things. Firstly, a correction to the use vimsh to enable VMotion on VMkernel Port Group. I need a restart of the VMware Management Service on the ESX host together with a brief sleep… additionally, I’ve also add the Ignoredisk attribute to ignore LUNs on the SAN to prevent kickstart from initialising or partitioning a SAN LUN accidentally.

Link:

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

I’ve been experimenting with the “hardware” options enabled in the UDA’s Kickstart Configurator for ESX. Unfortunately, this part of the UDA doesn’t seem to work. I’ve spent some hours trying to make it work but to no avail. I’m hoping once Carl has access to ESX servers then he will be able to make it work.

In the interim, I have worked out kickstart method which will do the job just as well.

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If you have been using the UDA for a while you will know that as you create templates this automagically builds the menu that operator uses after press F12. Occasionally you will want to modify this menu because you have added a new template to the list – and forgot to set a good or consistent description – or because made a typo. Currently the UDA 1.4 has no interface to editing the menu – so unfortunately you have to do by hand. That said its a very simple process.

There are two ways to change the menu – a quick and dirty method is to merely edit the text in /var/public/tftproot/messages.txt file. The downside is every time you add a new template to the UDA, and press save, this file is over-written. The true source of the menu information created at the PXE boot is actually held in /var/public/conf/templates.conf. You can edit this file to permanantly change both the view in the UDA’s Templates page and the menu viewed by the UDA operator. Once you have corrected your enteries, restart the UDA’s web service with service httpd restart.

I captured from an ILO card on a HP Proliant an ESX 3.x.x install as automated by the UDA… It’s nothing fantastic its about 3mins of silent video which shows the UDA from the “operators” perspective…

Click here to watch the video

Resolving the: “Error opening: kickstart file /tmp/ks.cfg: No such file or directory” message

Two problems have been found with ESX 2.x.x installations with UDA. We hope to resolve them soon. This information is offered as workaround.

First problem is that PXE client (our ESX host) does not receive the KS configuration file in timely enough fashion. I believe this is to do with how the boot-loader in ESX 2.x.x handles the “pump” signals required to release and renew the IP address. However, it maybe that the Apache web-service is the source of the problem.

The symptoms of the problem include a long wait at the “Determining host name and domain” message which finally result in a “Error opening: kickstart file /tmp/ks.cfg: No such file or directory” on them main kickstart screen. You can view extensive logging in a kickstart show if you press either alt+F4 or alt+F5 respectively. In an Alt+F4 viewsystems seems to hang from a long time on “nodns is 0…” and in the Alt+F5 view systems to hang on the message “eth0 NIC link is up….” This problem seems to afflict HTTP communications particular, this can be very easily rectified by configuring the UDA exports file to allow the PXE client to download the kickstart file using NFS rather than HTTP.The second problem is the default size of the RAM drive created by the ESX 2.x.x installation is not big enough. The results in a message which reads “Unable to retrieve the first install image”.  This can be very easily corrected by increasing the amount of memory allocated to the RAM drive.

To reconfigure the UDA to work with ESX 2.5.4 carry out the following tasks

1. Logon as root to the UDA using a secure shell client like putty
2. edit the /etc/exports file with a text editor like nano:nano -w /etc/exports
   
3. Copy the /solaris line with ctrl+k and ctrl+u to create this entry:/var/public/www/kickstart *(ro,nohide,insecure,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check,async)
   
4. Save the file and Exit
5. Restart the NFS service within the UDA withservice nfs restart
   
6. Login as admin to the UDA using the web-admin interface with a web-browser
7. Create a new template selecting ESX 2.x.x as your source
8. Modify the boot parameters to beappend ip=dhcp ksdevice=eth0 load_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=10240 initrd=initrd.esx252 network ks=nfs:192.168.3.150:/var/public/www/kickstart/test5.cfgNote:
   This creates a RAM drive of 10MB in size, and instructs kickstart to find the kickstart file on the NFS path, rather than a http path. Remember to replace the IP address here (192.168.3.150) with the IP address of your UDA. 

   The source code of ESX is still delivered by http. Even with this fix – it does take sometime for kickstart to make the transition from the “Determining host name and domain” message to download the ESX install image. In my system it took nearly 1 ½ minutes!

Update: Added some ESX 2.x.x kickstart files a while back. I discovered a problem where the /tmp partition was set to “grow”. This has been corrected…

In some environments it maybe not possible to use the UDA’s built-in DHCP daemon. It is possible to disable the DHCP Service on the UDA, and configure a Microsoft DHCP server to take over the role. This is quite an easy configuration change:

To Disable DHCP On the UDA:

1. Logon as Admin on the UDA’s web-admin tool
2. Click the Services link
3. Select the DHCP link
4. Click the Configure button
5. Disable the option for Start DHCP on boot
6. Click the Apply button
7. Click the Services link again
8. Select the DHCP link again
9. Click the Stop button

To Enable DHCP On the Windows DHCP:

1. Configure the following Scope Options or Server Options:
2. Enable the option 066 Boot Server Host Name, and set the empty string value to be the IP address of your UDA
3. Enable the option 067 Bootfile Name, and set the empty string to be, pxelinux.0