I want to distribute a Struts 2 application as a VMX appliance running Jeos. I had seen an Openbravo demo which was distributed as a VMX appliance. However, the appliance had to be accessed by typing an IP address in the browser. Is there a way to configure the appliance such that end user can access the appliance by typing a name, like a domain name?
It looks like what I wanted to achieve can be done using ways other than a VM appliance. I found some interesting information about deploying web applications
Related
For a POC for using AD on the google cloud with kuberenetes, I created a managed active directory, as is described in this link.
To add a gMSA account for the AD, I looked at this documentation.
It looks like I should use the New-ADServiceAccount command from the AD VM.
However, when looking at the domain I've created on pantheon , I couldn't find the VM it is on.
The interface does not give me any clues as to how I could add users, or do anything with the domain.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thank you,
It not written in the docs, but it is not complicated.
One should first join the domain from another windows machine (note that this is not supported on all windows OSes). This is done exactly like a regular machine joining a regular AD, as long as the domain and the machine are in the same vpc.
Then, install the AD roles on the joined machine, and run the New-ADServiceAccount commnad from there.
Comment 1:
Some machines on the GCE cannot join a domain (even with windows server datacenter). I have not figured out why, and instead opened a different machine.
Comment 2:
Windows integration in kubernetes is new, and possibly this answer will not be relevant in 6 mounts.
I'm using Amazon Directory Services with a Simple AD instance. I can join computers to the domain, but I can't figure out how to add users to the domain (and do not see in the documentation whether this is even possible).
How do I create a user in Amazon Simple AD?
You can manage users (and groups) via a bound instance's Active Directory Users and Computers tool. Details are here.
Note that due to a bug, this must be done from a Windows Server 2008 R2 instance at the time of writing. Windows Server 2012 is not supported at the time of writing per this post (registration required).
When building an OVF, you can specify a tag for VirtualSystemCollection that allows you to have multiple VMs to share the same base disk image, but any changes that the individual machines make are Copy-On-Write into a private disk area for each specific VM.
When you try to deploy images setup this way to EXSi, it complains Unsupported element 'VirtualSystemCollection'. It would appear that you need the commercial vCenter or vApp servers from VMWare to utilize this feature. (From what I've been able to grok so far)
Is there a way to do this through free software (Free like ESXi, or opensource)
The ultimate goal is that I want to have a single disk image that's used as a base - and to bring up a cluster of VMs that are then individually configured so that for a VM with a 500 meg disk, I only need '500M + (num_vms * delta_per_vm)' rather than '500M * num_vms'
An ESXi connected to a vCenter should support this via vApps but since you wanted a non-commercial solution, the closest things is to use VirtualBox.
The open source VirtualBox has multi-attach support to achieve this with different disk formats and it works very well. It also has special qcow, qemu copy on write disk support. Basically, you create a master disk and attach to multiple VMs. (Huge disk space saving.)
It can also happily import multiple VMs from a single OVA file with VirtualSystemCollection but unfortunately, it still requires manual intervention to tell VirtualBox that disks are shared after importing all the VMs. (Well, it defeats the appliance deployement in the first place...)
After creating master disk (or after deployment), attaching to multiple VMs can be done with GUI or with the following command:
VBoxManage storageattach "vm-name" --storagectl "sata1" --port 0 --device 0 --type hdd --medium base.vdi --mtype multiattach
For more information, see http://www.electricmonk.nl/log/2011/09/24/multiple-virtualbox-vms-using-one-base-image-copy-on-write/ and http://virtbjorn.blogspot.com.tr/2012/12/virtualbox-multi-attach-disk.html
If you really want to use VMWare ESXi, you can use data deduplication to achieve the same task on block level. (which is generally used with cloud hosting companies). You can see the deduplication success rates with open source tools here: http://opendedup.org/deduprates
In VMware products, a multi-tier appliance (VirtualSystemCollection) is called a vApp. In vSphere, vApps live in vCenter and not ESX. So yes, you need vCenter to import a VirtualSystemCollection.
If you are using Workstation, you can also try the free vApprun tool:
https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vapprun
Here is what I did successfully to have such OVF images imported into my free ESXi server.
In the OVF file a XML element VirtualSystemCollection defines the vApp.
You can manually edit the OVF file and remove or comment this part as shown bellow. This will allow to import the VM into ESXi without vCenter once the OVF image is converted using VMware OVF Tool.
<!-- ovf:VirtualSystemCollection ovf:id="dummy-id">
<ovf:Info>A collection of virtual machines</ovf:Info>
<ovf:Name>dummy-name</ovf:Name>
<ovf:StartupSection>
<ovf:Info>VApp startup section</ovf:Info>
<ovf:Item ovf:id="dummy-id" ovf:order="0" ovf:startAction="powerOn" ovf:startDelay="0" ovf:stopAction="powerOff" ovf:stopDelay="0"/>
</ovf:StartupSection-->
Keep the remaining part intact and remove the following line at the end.
</ovf:VirtualSystemCollection>
Also make sure you have the last ESXi Embedded Host Client installed to avoid other bug related problems during import.
https://labs.vmware.com/flings/esxi-embedded-host-client
Converting OVF to VMX can be done using VMWare OVF Tool. In command line it looks simply as following:
ovftool <path_to_source>/<myvm>.ovf <path_to_target>/<myvm>.vmx
We are using multiple vmware servers, that each host several vmware images/instances. Each department uses its own vmware server. The vmware instances are always accessed through the "VMWare infrastructure web access" web page from the console tab panel. The vmware servers are plain windows servers (nothing fancy).
Now it turns out that some of these vmware images are useful for multiple departments.
Of course we considered to copy these images, distributing them to all vmware servers, hosting the same image multiple times.
But we would in fact prefer to only host 1 copy of each instance. But still we would like to have all images accessible from 1 web page. Merging them to 1 server is of course impossible (performance-wise).
So, this got me wondering, perhaps there is a way to create hyperlinks within the vmware web access portal to vmware instances that are actually hosted on a different server. They would appear to be all on the same server but in fact they are distributed.
Does such thing exist, and how should it be configured ?
In mean time I found a reasonable solution for my problem.
The vmware-vmrc.exe can be called from the commandline with several parameters. For example with following parameters it will open the vmware session immediately without the need of specifying any credentials.
vmware-vmrc.exe -X -h hostname:8333 -u "username" -p "password" "[standard] ... .vmx"
Important: The "[standard] ... .vmx" value is not just a file name.
To know this value, you need to visit the webpage of your vmware
(e.g. https:// hostname:8333/ui/).
Next click the button "Configure VM" which will open a tab panel with configuration settings.
There you will find a setting called "Virtual Machine Configuration File". It often starts with the string "[standard]".
Next, it was really easy to write a little batch file that allows me to pick the desired vmware from a menu.
I'd like to have my ESX hosts add themselves to vCenter during the kickstart process (or in a script that runs after the first boot).
I can't find a method for doing this; is there one?
There are methods in the API to add hosts: one for standalone hosts, and one for hosts in a cluster.
I'm not sure what scripting tools you have available during the kickstart process, but I recommend using one of VMware's scripting wrappers: the PowerCLI for powershell, for instance. There are SDKs available in .Net and Perl, among others. See here for more API information.