"Bare metal" or Bring Your Own OS blueprints? Is it possible?

[craigso]

Hello, thanks for taking the time to read this thread!

Our team is starting to build some VM provisioning blueprints. We've managed to build a blueprint with t-shirt sizing for a small and medium size VM of either RHEL or Windows Server. This blueprint works great. We would also like to offer our customers a "Bare Metal" VM (for lack of a better term) which would allow them to install their own OS post provisioning. We would just set all the VM settings similar to our t-shirt sized VMs, except there would be no OS installed. Given we will have multiple supported Windows OSs available, this template would be for Linux OSs.

Has anyone done this and is it possible? In my search, I didn't really turn up much.

[daphnissov]

I've not tried that myself, but I don't see why it shouldn't be possible. You'd just skip basically every kind of customization and extensibility possible. The reason I don't see that much is because it's pretty antithesis to the whole concept of cloud to begin with. Letting customers/users build whatever they want and put whatever they want on it is basically going back to enabling shadow IT and "laptop builds" and that's one of the whole reasons for implementing something like vRA to begin with.

[craigso]

I don't disagree. Our use case is somewhat different being a research university where funding doesn't always come from the top down. It's not uncommon for a researcher to require some abstract OS which is doesn't make sense to maintain a template for due to contract times, project lengths, single use cases. If we don't supply a VM it will be created in a true shadow IT environment elsewhere on campus. It's unique and not great in that sense. Without getting into the politics behind it, thats what is driving this request.

A few things we are running across in our quest for this type of VM:

- Setting the Guest OS type in vCenter

- Setting the network adapter

I'm going to dig into the vCenter API to see if I can grab a list of OS types from the product.

Network adapter, we can select this however it won't get set automatically if the VM customization spec isn't ran by vcenter. Seems like perhaps a day two operation post OS install and VMware tools installation to configure Guest OS settings, NIC, and assigning IP info. Am I on the right track here?

[qc4vmware]

Here is a little package of utilities I put together around guest os types a long time ago.  Hopefully something in here will be helpful.  Take a look at "QClistSupportedGuestOsTypesForHost" and "QClistGuestOsIdentifiers".  Hopefully you can modify them or they might point you in the right direction.

[craigso]

Thank you for posting these utilities. I'll take a look!