vRA 7.5 and Apple OSX blueprints

[emcclure]

Hello,

Is there a way in vRA 7.5 to customize an Apple OSX image to rename the OS host name?  I have the prefix setup to rename the VM, but I want the hostname to match as well.  I know how to do that manually, but don't want to do that of course.  I tried installing the Linux guest agent on there, but of course it failed.  I'm not sure if any custom properties will work or not either and I know there's no Guest OS Customization in vCenter for Mac, unless I can somehow use a Linux one for it.  Any help appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

[daphnissov]

vRA doesn't support deployment of MacOS guests at all, so I suspect no.

[emcclure]

So even though I can install ESXi on a Mac Pro, attach it to vCenter and run OSX VM's and create a blueprint in vRA that builds me a new Mac VM it's not officially supported?  So whatever I find that can work is great, but not supported if something goes wrong?  Well that stinks.

[daphnissov]

According to the official vRA support matrix MacOS is not a supported guest OS, no. If it works, that's great, and I'm sure there are other workarounds possible if all you want is to change the name.

[eoinbyrne]

You can use vRO to SSH to the VM and run commands in the guest so you could use an EventBroker subscription at say MachineActivated. You could pull the hostname from the event payload and then SSH and call a script/command to set the hostname in the guest.

We've done this extensively before against Unix VMs provisioned by an Openstack endpoint and it works very well. We were able to do all sorts

Add and configure additional volumes

Add and configure addition NICs

Install Oracle on a single node

Install Oracle RAC across a pair of nodes

Have a look in vRO for the OOTB SSH workflows - they are very generic so the only work you'd have is in creating and managing the scripts you want to run

HTH

[emcclure]

Cool thanks for the tip.  We have another team here that has a script that renames Mac images, but they don't use vRA, they use something more customized, so that script could work when I find the workflow to use thru vRO.