Deploying vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 Via the CLI

One of my customers wanted to deploy a new vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 environment.  I helped them build JSON answer files and deploy their VCSA 6.0 environment, so they asked me to update them for the new version.  The JSON file format has been updated a bit, so I decided to start fresh from the template to ensure that I had everything that we needed.  Most of it was self-explanatory, except that I ran into a bit of trouble at one point.

The template has a section like this, for determining where the appliances are going to be deployed:

"VC" : {
 ...
 "datacenter" : [
  "parent folder",
  "child folder",
  "Datacenter"
 ]
 ...
 "target" : [
  "parent folder",
  "child folder",
  "<ESXi host or DRS cluster>"
 ]
 ...
}




I had a bit of trouble understanding what data to enter into those fields, which was causing my appliance deployments to fail.  Fortunately, the error message was helpful (although I had to spend a bit of time digging around to find the pertinent bit).



I was trying to deploy to a specific host in a cluster that sat in my datacenter.  To find that host, the system looks in the datacenter specified in the "datacenter" section (duh), looking in the system managed "hosts" folder.  Then, it looks for the specific path specified in the "target" section, under that system "hosts" folder.



So, for example, if my ESXi Host (myHost.myDomain) was in a cluster (myCluster) that was in a Datacenter (myDatacenter), the path that I would need it to generate is \myDatacenter\Hosts\myCluster\myHost.myDomain.  In order to do that, I would need to fill out those sections of the template files thusly:




"VC" : {
 ...
 "datacenter" : [
  "myDatacenter"
 ]
 ...
 "target" : [
  "myCluster",
  "myHost.myDomain"
 ]
 ...
}





I hope this helps!






































Comments











Post a Comment


Sorry guys, I've been getting a lot of spam recently, so I've had to turn on comment moderation.  I'll do my best to moderate them swiftly after they're submitted,






























Popular posts from this blog









Clone a Standard vSwitch from one ESXi Host to Another





















One of my customers is standardizing the configurations on their HP C7000 enclosures (they've been set up at various sites by various administrators with varying involvement from the architecture team).  As such, we need to stand up some temporary resources so that we can take down the main enclosure for reconfiguration.  That's fine, we can easily ship a smaller enclosure to each site for temporary compute resources.  Some of the sites are using Standard vSwitches, so we need to be able to quickly copy the networking configuration over from their existing blades to these new, slightly different blades.  As I see it, we had 2 good options:   1) Capture a Host Profile with the desired vSwitch configuration.  Delete every other component of the Host Profile so that only the networking section is applied; design the new ESXi hosts so that the vSwitches'll work with the old vmnic-to-vswitch configurations.   2) Write a script to clone the vSwitch from ones ESXi host to another.








Read more










PowerShell Sorting by Multiple Columns





















PowerShell's Sort-Object cmdlet is super useful, especially when preparing output for human consumption.  A few people have found my blog while looking for more information about its use, specifically while looking for how to sort by multiple columns (well, properties, technically).  I've never done so (much less written about it), so I hope those folks found answers elsewhere.  But, it got me curious... and it turns out that it's really easy.   The Technet article on Sort-Object  has the answer directly spelled out: just use commas to create a list of properties to sort by (in order to precedence).  Let's look at some examples!  First, prepare a variable with some good sortable data:    $myData = get-eventlog System -newest 25    And then we can get to sorting!  Say you want to sort primarily by EntryType (Warning, Information, Error) and then by Source.  Easy-peasy:    $myData | sort EntryType,Source    How about if you want it to be in descending order?  Yeah, there&








Read more










Deleting Orphaned (AKA Zombie) VMDK Files





















A problem that most Virtualization Administrators need to deal with is Orphaned VMDK files (or Zombie VMDK files, as some people call them).  These are Virtual Machine hard drive files that are just hanging out, taking up storage, but are attached to no VMs.  How can this happen?  Well, the most common way is when an administrator needs to delete a VMDK but isn't quite ready to commit... so, after pressing "remove", they select "remove from virtual machine" rather than "remove and delete files".  The intent is always good: "I want to be able to restore this if it turns out to be necessary... so I'll just come back and delete it next week if nothing breaks!"  But, of course, next week something else happens and the file doesn't get deleted.  After a little while, it turns into "which files did I rename, again?" and nothing seems to happen.   So, how do you deal with these orphaned files?  Well, a few years ago I found a scrip








Read more