Bringing up a FreeBSD VM with baseline CLI configuration on ESXi

dee912 — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 19:39:16 GMT

Hi,

Just getting started off on this - I have a small setup where I have some FreeBSD images created as VMs on ESXi 5.5 and am using vSphere as the client.

Below are the objectives I am trying to acieve :

[1] Bring up 5 VMs with the FreeBSD image I have, with some baseline configuration for example: management IP assigned and ssh enabled.

[2] Currently, I have manually mapped the vSwitches containg the vnics to the physical nics on the ESXi server from which there are outgoing connections to external routers

For [2] I believe I can write a perl/python script that uses the esxcli interface to automate the same.

- Is there a better way to do this ?

For [1] however, I am not clear on how to accomplish this.

- Can a VM template help with this ?

- Is there a way by which I can combine a baseline config file with the vmdk image and then boot the VM up using the same ?

- How would virtual appliances fit into this picture ?

Would appreciate any input you would have on the above.

Thanks.

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Bringing up a FreeBSD VM with baseline CLI configuration on ESXi