Hi all
I have SRM 4.1 running and customising Windows guests' networking great. Having problems with Linux customisation though and wondered if anybody could point me in the right direction.
It's all Debian 5 x64, about 15 VMs.
I've done a lot of searching and am aware that VSphere 4.1 is allegedly the last to support customisation of Debian 5 guests. I have tried in vain to get a custom spec applied to a Linux VM, either by SRM or by manually cloning etc. Clone and/or vm recovery works fine but no customisation appears to be performed on the Linux VMs. So given the lack of future support for custom specs, perhaps the answer lies in some scripting somewhere. I am no scripting guru but routinely knock up vbscripts etc. for the windows environment so i am perhaps familiar with concepts.
How do you guys customise your Linux guests' networking settings during SRM failover or testing? If somebody could explain the 'mechanics' of how they do it in suitably basic terms for my small brain that would be greatly appreciated! And any examples would be amazing!
eg. I'm guessing that probably the least involved method would be to have a script on each VM that is then remotely executed by SRM in a call-out script. The guest-based script could even just copy pre-configured interfaces and resolv.conf files. In this scenario what actual process would run the script inside the guest? Does VCenter speak to the guest VMware Tools, and then vmware tools executes the script? In high-level terms, how does an SRM callout script running on Windows Server ultimately execute a command on a Linux VM?
Not after being spoon-fed but I'm fairly new to this and my knowledge of Linux is verging on embarrassing at present and have drawn blanks with google and the vmware communities. Aware of Perl, PowerCLI, even VIX options but looking for a leg-up if poss.
Thanks.
