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vCloud Automation Center vCAC 6.0 – Using Linux Kickstart to Provision to Physical HP Server over iLo

That big ole title pretty much says it all. In this article I’m going to walk through how to deploy RHEL (Centos) Linux onto a Physical HP Server over the iLo interface using Kickstart. When provisioning to Physical servers such as an HP Proliant DL360 there are two methods built into vCAC. One is the use of PXE boot, and the other is via the iLo interface.

There are pro and cons to both PXE and remote mounting an ISO over the iLo interface. PXE has the obvious cons of the network requirements, having a PXE server available and if you want true flexibility you will need to do a little custom work. ISO mount over iLo tend to be a bit slower due to the over head of remote mounting a ISO and the speed of the iLo interface. In this article I will be covering remote mounting an ISO over iLo, but I will be covering PXE is a later article.

What do we need

To start we need the Physical HP server to be racked and cabled up. It’s iLo interface should be configured and licensed, the network interfaces should be cabled in and the switches should be configured for the appropriate Vlans etc. The drives in the server should also be initialized. vCAC will not create any raid groups etc for you, you must do this manually. My examples also requires a web server that can be utilized to store the needed files on the network.

Continue reading “vCloud Automation Center vCAC 6.0 – Using Linux Kickstart to Provision to Physical HP Server over iLo”

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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.2 – Installing the 5.2 Guest Agent on Linux

The Linux Guest agent has not changed much since 5.1. You will notice most everything except the agent version remains basically the same as my article on executing scripts with the 5.1 Linux Guest agent.

Linux Guest Agent

The Linux guest agent has a number of feature benefits that you receive if you utilize it. The Linux guest agent is a small agent that acts very similarly to the vCAC proxy agents. When it is installed you give it the name or IP address of the vCAC server. This allows it to check in with the server when it loads on a newly provisioned machine and determine if there is anything it needs to do. If the vCAC server has work for it to do it send the instructions and the agent executes the instructions on the local guest operating system. The guest agent comes with a number of pre-built scripts and functions, but also allows you to execute your own scripts. Some of the features available with the Linux Guest Agent are:

  • Disk Operations – Partition, Format, and mount disk that is added to the machine.
  • Execute Scripts – Execute scripts after the machine is provisioned.
  • Network Operations – Configure setting for additional network interfaces added to the machine.

Continue reading “vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.2 – Installing the 5.2 Guest Agent on Linux”

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DailyHypervisor Forums are online.

We have just launched our DailyHypervisor Forum located at http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/forum. Stop by, contribute and be a part of our community. The DH Forum is intended to be for all things cloud. Currently we have forums created for vCAC, vCD, vCO, Cloud General, and Openstack. More forum categories will be coming based on demand. If you have a category you would like to see shoot us a note and let us know.

Our goal is to create a common place where anyone can come to learn, get help, share ideas, or just about anything that will help foster knowledge regarding cloud computing. Considering this very blog is the announcement of our forum you could image there isn’t a whole lot happening yet so what are you waiting for, be the first. Go ask a question, post an issue, share a thought and let’s get things rolling.

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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Custom Property of the Day #1 – Operating System

Property of the day is a new series I’m starting where I will cover a different custom property each day. This is the first property of the day check back each day for a new property.

POTD #1 Operating System
 
vCAC version: 5.1
 
Property Name
 
VMware.VirtualCenter.OperatingSystem
 
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Enable Connect Using SSH

You may have noticed on the security tab of a blueprint there is an option you can enable to “Connect using RDP or SSH”. You may have also noticed when you provision a Windows Server you see a “Connect using RDP” menu option, but when you provision a Linux Server you don’t see a “Connect using SSH” option. This article is going to tell you how to enable the “Connect using SSH” option for Linux Servers.

There are a few things you need to know before we enable this. Windows does not have a default SSH handler, so simply enabling this option won’t do you a whole lot of good unless you configure Windows for a default SSH handler. Doing this will require a registry edit. There are tools that enable this as part of their installation, but I’m going to show you how to do it using putty.
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Executing Scripts with the Linux Guest Agent

I’ve been getting asked a lot of question on how to execute scripts within Linux Guest Systems using vCAC. There are a few components to executing scripts in a Linux Guest OS which I’m going to cover in this post. Those items are:

  • Linux Guest Agent
  • Custom Properties

Linux Guest Agent

The Linux guest agent has a number of feature benefits that you receive if you utilize it. The Linux guest agent is a small agent that acts very similarly to the vCAC proxy agents. When it is installed you give it the name or IP address of the vCAC server. This allows it to check in with the server when it loads on a newly provisioned machine and determine if there is anything it needs to do. If the vCAC server has work for it to do it send the instructions and the agent executes the instructions on the local guest operating system. The guest agent comes with a number of pre-built scripts and functions, but also allows you to execute your own scripts. Some of the features available with the Linux Guest Agent are:

  • Disk Operations – Partition, Format, and mount disk that is added to the machine.
  • Execute Scripts – Execute scripts after the machine is provisioned.
  • Network Operations – Configure setting for additional network interfaces added to the machine.

Continue reading “vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Executing Scripts with the Linux Guest Agent”

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Setitng up Hyper-V Linux Integration Components on SLES 10

After finally setting up a SLES 10 server on Hyper-V I thought I write a little how to on getting the Linux Integration components working. Microsoft includes an install doc that doesn’t really tell the whole story.

I had already installed SLES before I read the manual and found out that XEN Virtualization support needed to be installed as well and Microsoft documentation also states that you need the C++ compiler. What they really mean is the gcc compiler. What they fail to mention is that you also need he kernel-sources installed as well.

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