Accepted Solutions
If it's ESX, then part of your kickstart could generate the thumbprint and upload those results to an NFS server which vMA has access to, perhaps a list of hostnames + thumbprint. You could write a small script that basically watches a directory for updates and then automatically add them to vCenter once the system is ready to go, you can probably do something similar with ESXi but it'll be more tricky as you don't have a real way of "kickstarting" the host. However, you can edit the image and put your own scripts such as a python script to extract the thumbprint and again doing the same thing by dumping the output to a shared volume which vMA has access to.
If you're interested in ESXi script modification, take a look at Maish's 4 part article on how you can configure the ESXi host to ping back to a management host - http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2010/04/esxi-deployment-solution-beginning.html
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William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009,2010
VMware scripts and resources at:
Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)
Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
The IPMI/iLO power settings is only configurable on a host that is being managed by vCenter, you'll notice that the "Power Management" option is not available when you connect directly to the host using vSphere Client, only when you connect to vCenter.
So in terms of automating this via kickstart and using the Service Console, this will not be possible. You'll need to use the vSphere API whether that is with vSphere SDK for Perl, PowerCLI, VI Java, etc. to run this post configuration.
For anything that I can't automate via kickstart build, there are a set of post scripts that I'll run using vMA host which run vSphere SDK for Perl scripts that'll run through and perform any configuration changes that require vCenter or just can't be done using kickstart. Some of these operations would be create a new cluster on vCenter, setup the appropriate configurations for HA/DRS, join a host to vCenter and perform operations such as updating IPMI settings.
If you're interested in a vSphere SDK for Perl solution, I can put some together this evening, but if you're more comfortable with Windows, you can use PowerCLI and Mike Laverick has blogged about automating this using PowerCLI here
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William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
Sure, I'll provide a write up probably tonight or tomorrow.
Are you at least familiar with vMA? or the vCLI, you'll need an environment that has one of these setup to run the vSphere SDK for Perl scripts.
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware scripts and resources at:
Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)
Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
Take a look at the script posted here - http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2010/06/script-ipmiconfigpl.html
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware scripts and resources at:
Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)
Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
If it's ESX, then part of your kickstart could generate the thumbprint and upload those results to an NFS server which vMA has access to, perhaps a list of hostnames + thumbprint. You could write a small script that basically watches a directory for updates and then automatically add them to vCenter once the system is ready to go, you can probably do something similar with ESXi but it'll be more tricky as you don't have a real way of "kickstarting" the host. However, you can edit the image and put your own scripts such as a python script to extract the thumbprint and again doing the same thing by dumping the output to a shared volume which vMA has access to.
If you're interested in ESXi script modification, take a look at Maish's 4 part article on how you can configure the ESXi host to ping back to a management host - http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2010/04/esxi-deployment-solution-beginning.html
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009,2010
VMware scripts and resources at:
Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)
Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".