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pizzle85
Expert
Expert

vCAC 6.0 Windows Advanced Guide?

My company has recently acquired vCAC as part of the vCloud Suite. We provide VM hosting as a service to departments within the company. Were trying to allow self provisioning of VMs through vCAC. We have the very basics set up and are able to clone off machines from templates. I have been searching high and low with little success to find a complete guide to provide some of the basic level advanced features. Would anyone out there be willing to point me in the direction of some good literature that would guide us through some advanced features.

To start were looking to do something very simple by creating a "sandbox" for our developers to quickly stand up development servers. Were looking for the following:

  • Clone Windows 2012 R2 VM from an existing template (does this need to be configured in some particular fashion? sysprepped? would i be able to do the rest of this if it were a new vm instead of a clone?)
  • Place the new machine in the "Sandbox" vCenter folder (I achieved this by using the custom property of "VMware.VirtualCenter.Folder)
  • Allow the user to select a unique hostname for vCenter and the machine name (i achieved this for vCenter using a custom property of "Hostname")
  • Set the Time Zone
  • Configure the networking on the next available IP in a single /24 subnet block (i set up a network profile but am not sure how that gets applied, do i need the windows agent?)
  • Create Active Directory Computer object in "AD/OU/Sandbox" OU (I havent attempted this and assume i need to write a custom powershell script thats called, any advice from people who have done this would be greatly appreciated)
  • Join the machine to active directory

I've configured a build profile that specifies most of these settings but they don't apply at build. I've read a lot about the windows client but that doesn't seem to be necessary for any of these steps as they should all be accomplished by the sysprep commands in the build profile. Any guidance anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated!

-Paul

5 Replies
qc4vmware
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

So far I have had success using vCO.  Most things I handle in either the buildingMachine stub call out or the MachineProvisioned call out.  In our flow I create a machine object in AD in the desired OU which could be hard coded in your blueprint or made available from a dropdown or just free form allow the entry.  When the customization runs I have our customization spec configured to join the domain and it attaches to the object without issues.  I have been using the workflows to run programs or scripts in the guest os in the MachineProvisioned to do some final tweaking.

Take a look at this video vCAC-extensibility-package .  This still applies to 6.0 and is included in the plugin although VMware have not documented it at this point specifically for 6.0.  In 5.2 it was not part of the core vCAC plugin but appears to be now.

Techstarts
Expert
Expert

pizzle85 wrote:

My company has recently acquired vCAC as part of the vCloud Suite. We provide VM hosting as a service to departments within the company. Were trying to allow self provisioning of VMs through vCAC. We have the very basics set up and are able to clone off machines from templates. I have been searching high and low with little success to find a complete guide to provide some of the basic level advanced features. Would anyone out there be willing to point me in the direction of some good literature that would guide us through some advanced features.

To start were looking to do something very simple by creating a "sandbox" for our developers to quickly stand up development servers. Were looking for the following:

  • Clone Windows 2012 R2 VM from an existing template (does this need to be configured in some particular fashion? sysprepped? would i be able to do the rest of this if it were a new vm instead of a clone?)

-[Preetam] I have blogged about it here. I faced similar challenges. It took quite a while for me  to understand there are limited properties that can be used when you use cloning workflow. It is bit clear we as VMware admin have to create a master image, this master image should be optimized at virtual machine hardware level, then OS level by optimizing or tuning OS (e.g. disabling unnecessary services). So long answer short -> yes you have to sysprep it and domain join credentials should be in sysprep i.e. customization manager

  • Place the new machine in the "Sandbox" vCenter folder (I achieved this by using the custom property of "VMware.VirtualCenter.Folder)

[Preetam] Yeah this is the right approach

  • Allow the user to select a unique hostname for vCenter and the machine name (i achieved this for vCenter using a custom property of "Hostname")

[Preetam] Yeah this is the right approach

  • Set the Time Zone

[Preetam] Please use sysprep for this. If you're deploying machines in different time zone, use guest agent and script to change it

  • Configure the networking on the next available IP in a single /24 subnet block (i set up a network profile but am not sure how that gets applied, do i need the windows agent?)

[Preetam] You are right. It is achievable using network profile. I have blogged about it here. Create network profile and simply attached to blue print/reservation

  • Create Active Directory Computer object in "AD/OU/Sandbox" OU (I havent attempted this and assume i need to write a custom powershell script thats called, any advice from people who have done this would be greatly appreciated)

[Preetam] This is achievable using blueprint? Just unable to recall

  • Join the machine to active directory

[Preetam] As mentioned above it will be coming through sysprep.

I've configured a build profile that specifies most of these settings but they don't apply at build. I've read a lot about the windows client but that doesn't seem to be necessary for any of these steps as they should all be accomplished by the sysprep commands in the build profile. Any guidance anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated!

-Paul

With Great Regards,
pizzle85
Expert
Expert

thanks qc4vmware, with 6.0 and the vCloud Suite license vCO is not an available endpoint, support has said this will be resolved in SP1. When it comes out we'll look into utilizing vCO to do customization over customizing the vCAC workflow stubs.

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qc4vmware
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

FYI they posted the 6.0.1 patch last night.

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pizzle85
Expert
Expert

My company has recently acquired vCAC as part of the vCloud Suite. We provide VM hosting as a service to departments within the company. Were trying to allow self provisioning of VMs through vCAC. We have the very basics set up and are able to clone off machines from templates. I have been searching high and low with little success to find a complete guide to provide some of the basic level advanced features. Would anyone out there be willing to point me in the direction of some good literature that would guide us through some advanced features.

To start were looking to do something very simple by creating a "sandbox" for our developers to quickly stand up development servers. Were looking for the following:

  • Clone Windows 2012 R2 VM from an existing template (does this need to be configured in some particular fashion? sysprepped? would i be able to do the rest of this if it were a new vm instead of a clone?)

To accomplish this i just did a vanilla install of Server 2012 on a vm set a admin password and did not sysprep it and converted it to a template.

  • Place the new machine in the "Sandbox" vCenter folder (I achieved this by using the custom property of "VMware.VirtualCenter.Folder)

Using the mentioned property appropriately names the VM in vCenter

  • Allow the user to select a unique hostname for vCenter and the machine name (i achieved this for vCenter using a custom property of "Hostname")

To achieve this i created a vCenter custom sysprep "Specification". IN the specification i configured the Computer Name as "Use the virtual machine name".

  • Set the Time Zone

I configured this in the vCenter specification mentioned above

  • Configure the networking on the next available IP in a single /24 subnet block (i set up a network profile but am not sure how that gets applied, do i need the windows agent?)

In the vCenter specification i left the defult "Use standard..." and it used the IP addresses i used in the network profile in vCAC.

  • Create Active Directory Computer object in "AD/OU/Sandbox" OU (I havent attempted this and assume i need to write a custom powershell script thats called, any advice from people who have done this would be greatly appreciated)

I haven't completed this, there are tons of blogs out there that describe how to do this. The two primary methods i see are to use a vCO endpoint to run a vCO workflow. The other is to modify the vCAC workflow stub to execute a custom PowerShell script that preforms the task.

  • Join the machine to active directory

I configured this in the vCenter specification mentioned above

For the vCenter specification to work with vCAC I created a new custom property on the blueprint with a Name of CloneSpec and a value that was the name of the vCenter specification. This told the workflow to look for the vCenter specification and apply it to the machine being cloned.

I've configured a build profile that specifies most of these settings but they don't apply at build. I've read a lot about the windows client but that doesn't seem to be necessary for any of these steps as they should all be accomplished by the sysprep commands in the build profile. Any guidance anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated!

-Paul

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