Ultimate Deployment Appliance

[VMTN_Admin]

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/232

Deploy your favorite OS by pressing F12, bring your own ISO's, we'll do the rest

[Michelle_Laveri]

Guys,

I'm (FINALLY) getting round to updating the documentation surrounding UDA 2.0 Build20. Previous documentation referrence ESX4.x and not ESX5.x...

I've re-uploaded the UDA files to my new site: http://www.mikelaverick.com/download/

and I'm in the process of editing the original getting started guide to fit in with ESXi 5.x.

There's one thing I'm missing is accurate and good "subtemplate" and "advanced" template files. Somehow I lost mine along road. It's been sometime since I used the UDA in anger because nowadays I do factory resets of my lab hosts, and configure them with PowerCLI. In the past I was heavy user as the UDA was my main way of rebuilding/reseting my lab...

Does anyone have good and update "subtemplate" and "advanced" templates they can share with me that i can use (re)use rather than having to start from scratch. They should do things like enable VMotion/FT and perhaps iSCSI with mulitple VMK ports for true load-balancing. These templates should really be good examples of how to post-script the ESX hosts...

...and of course I will give credit where credit is due on the blog... 🙂

Regards

Mike

[Michelle_Laveri]

I take no-one has a valid/recent/uptodate subtemplate/template files they can share here?

Regards

Mike

[digya]

Hi All,

UDA is an excelellent tool.I have recently started using it and am new to PXE stuff.I am applying this tool for installations of Linux(RHEL),Windows(7,8,Server2k8,server2k12),solaris(x86,sparc) and esx(4,5) for Lab setup of our organisation.

I am facing issues with installing windows 2012 as it is giving below error while installing::

windows cannot find microsoft software license terms................

One thing  I know that this is a 180 days evaluation iso. Windows 2k8 r2 installs smoothly.

Can someone point me towards a solution for this?

Also ,i am confused about the path of unattended installation file(xml) for windows flavours on uda appliance.Can i use an external tool like ADK to configure it and then paste in template part of the uda GUI...

Please help me to fix these issues.

Thanks in Advance,

Amit

[chewy147uk]

Hi there,

Just wondering if someone could clear up something for me. Currently I'm using UDA to deploy ESX 4.1 hosts but there is now a need to upgrade to 5.5. After checking on the UDA site it states that it supports ESXi 5 but nothing about 5.5 specifically. Is anyone else using UDA to deploy ESXi 5.5 hosts?

Any info will be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Lee

[Michelle_Laveri]

I tried the import/use of the UDA under 5.5 when it was in beta, and it worked first time without Karl needing to make any changes...

I've not tried it since the GA... But so long as the .ISO imports you should be good to go...

The main thing that causes an issue for the UDA with ESX if VMware moves files about on the DVD.iso that are used as part of the PXE boot. After that there's isn't really anything the UDA is doing to the core .iSO...

Regards

Mike

[chewy147uk]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the fast reply. I wanted to get some idea if it would work before spending time on trying it out. I'll go get my hands dirty and give it a go now then I think the biggest issue I'll hit is changing the scripts around to work with ESXi 5.5 but a bit of trial and error will soon have these licked.

Thanks againg for the fast reply Mike

Regards

Lee

[Michelle_Laveri]

Your welcome. Can I ask how your getting on. I managed to get a successfully UDA/5.5 install into a VM. When I tried it with one of my old servers it hung at a prompt -

That was odd, because I have manually installed ESX5.5 from DVD.iSO without a problem...

Regards

Mike

[tomwaters]

Hi Mike...not sure if you monitor this any more...but I just came across this when i was looking for a home PXE setup and am downloading it now for use under esxi 5.5. It looks perfect for my needs.

Hopefully everything goes well.

Just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work and hosting the files and guide

Cheers.

[Michelle_Laveri]

Certainly do monitor this thread! 🙂

Glad you like the appliance/docs. Please feel free to use this thread if you have any questions...

Regards

Mike

[tomwaters]

Excellent!

Well, the install and updates went well....however I am having issues accessing my (Solaris 11.1) shares using CIFS. ...but that may be just me!

NFS works fine.

via the UDM GUI (Storage) I try to access my windows share (CIFS).

It "appears" to work and accepts my share information and passwords (and even creates the path in "/var/public/operating-systemISOs") with no errors displayed.

However the share does not show up in any of the onscreen gui (eg. storage or OS).

The very strange thing is that the share DOES show as there when login to the console as root and browse to  "/var/public/operating-systemISOs"

note: I have also tested mounting the share using the command line (ie. from root #) using the standard command like the following and it all works fine

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.0.1/serverdata/ /media/operating-systemISOs -o username=myCIFSUserName,password=myCIFSPassword

One other thing I noticed...I need to remove the leading "/" from the ImageFilename field in the "New Operating Wizard" to have it load my ISO...

Other than that..I am off and running and successfully booted an iso from PXE And so it begins..now to locate/setup other useful stuff like memtest, Acronis, Ubuntu liveCD and the like.

Thanks so much for making this appliance and more importantly, documenting and supporting it over all this time! You rock!

[Michelle_Laveri]

Okay this is an old chestnut - that goes back to days gone by...

I speak of making sure that the ESX installer touches the right disk. This used to be concern for just FC LUNs that weren't masked. I'm now looking at it from a Virtual SAN perspective...

Suppose you want to automate the re-install of ESXi to a local disk, without touching an existing VSAN constructed of local share-storage...

Anyone tried this - and give me a feel for their experiences - its been a good 4-5 years since i last looked at this issue seriously...

Cheers

Mike

[inica]

Has anyone succeeded in installing ESXi 5.1 using UDA on a UEFI booted host?

I have a test system, which is stuck at "trying to load: pxelinux: <some filename>

I'm not that savvy in Linux, just installed UDA, made a template, made a subtemplate, like the Mike's admin guide suggest.

I also tried to use the 01-<mac> approach, when it finds the file, it gets stuck at that file.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

[unsichtbare]

I have been using the same UDA since 4.X and it still deploys ESXi 6.X, even vendor-customized ISOs today! What a great tool for the vSphere environment that provides a simple, elegant alternative to some of the VMware-branded alternatives!

After your DHCP Server is set correctly, then here are the settings you will need:

Kernel:

[OS].[FLAVOR].mboot.c32

Kernel option command-line:

-c /pxelinux.cfg/templates/[TEMPLATE]/[SUBTEMPLATE].cfg

Kickstart File:

accepteula

rootpw P@ssw0rd

install --firstdisk --overwritevmfs

network --bootproto=dhcp --addvmportgroup=1

reboot