{"id":825,"date":"2014-01-21T10:31:05","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T16:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benincosa.com\/blog\/?p=825"},"modified":"2014-11-19T11:23:55","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T17:23:55","slug":"configure-vmware-vcenter-appliance-without-windows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/?p=825","title":{"rendered":"Configure VMware from scratch without Windows"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the things that bugs me about vCenter (still) is that it is still very tied to the Windows operating system. \u00a0You have to have Windows to set it up and trying to go about without Windows is still somewhat difficult. \u00a0In my lab I’m trying to get away from doing Windows. \u00a0I have xCAT installed to PXEboot UCS Blades to do what I want. \u00a0Its great, and its automated. \u00a0But when I installed 8 nodes to be ESXi hosts I quickly realized I needed vCenter to demonstrate this and use this as others would.<\/p>\n

That requires vCenter. \u00a0VMware has had the vCenter appliance out for a few years now. \u00a0It runs on SLES and comes preconfigured. \u00a0The only problem is installing it when you have no vCenter client because today those clients are only made for the Windows Operating system. \u00a0How to get around this?<\/p>\n

ovftool was the thing I found that did the job for me. \u00a0I found the link by reading the ever prolific Virtual Ghetto post on deploying ovftool<\/a> on ESXi. \u00a0Since I had Linux, installing ovftool on the ESXi host wasn’t necessary for me. \u00a0Instead I just installed it on my Linux server (with some trouble since it deploys this stub and you have to make sure you don’t modify the file).<\/p>\n

I ran the command:<\/p>\n

ovftool -ds=NFS1 VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.0.5201-1476389_OVF10.ova vi:\/\/root:password@node01<\/p>\n

After that, I watched my DHCP server and saw that it gave the vCenter appliance the IP address of 172.20.200.1. \u00a0Hopefully you have DHCP or you might be hosed.<\/p>\n

Then after finding the docs, I intuitively opened my web browser to https:\/\/172.20.200.1:5480. (everyone knows that port number right?) I then logged in with user ‘root’ and password ‘vmware’ and started the auto setup. \u00a0After changing the IP address and restarting the appliance I was pretty golden.<\/p>\n

Once configured, log into the appliance at https:\/\/172.20.1.101:9443\/vsphere-client\/ and then be stoked that you have flash player already installed and that it works. \u00a0Oh you didn’t have flash player installed on your linux server? \u00a0That sucks, I didn’t either. \u00a0Guess that’s another hoop we have to jump through. But wait, then you find that Flash 11.2.0 is the last Flash that has been released for Linux. \u00a0Guess what? \u00a0VMware requires Flash version 11.5. \u00a0Nice.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/communities.vmware.com\/message\/2319263<\/p>\n

At this point I just copied a Windows VM that I had laying around and started managing it from there. \u00a0The moral of the story is that you can’t do a Windows free VMware environment. \u00a0Sure, I could have done fancy scripting and managed it all remotely with some of their tools, but if I’m going to be doing all that, why should I pay for VMware? \u00a0I’d be better off just doing straight native KVM. \u00a0YMMV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the things that bugs me about vCenter (still) is that it is still very tied to the Windows operating system. \u00a0You have to have Windows to set it up and trying to go about without Windows is still somewhat difficult. \u00a0In my lab I’m trying to get away from doing Windows. \u00a0I have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[220,920,39],"tags":[222,921,223,981,221],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=825"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2750,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions\/2750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}