In any very large environment there are multiple versions of software running. Any time one component is updated, no matter how much testing is done, there can still be issues. Our Image Pipeline process was running smoothly until we upgraded vCenter servicing our build cluster from 6.5 to 6.7 U3 (no ESXi upgrade). Everything seemed... Continue Reading →
Large Scale Image Pipeline – Part 4 – Importing OVA’s to vCenter 6.5 Content Libraries
The last process in this Image Pipeline series is getting OVA's into LOCAL Content Libraries across our environment. To do this I compare the latest list of OVA's in the Artifactory generated array via my previous post to what's currently in the Content Library. Then I have to add the OVA if it doesn't exist... Continue Reading →
Large Scale Image Pipeline – Part 3 – Query Artifactory via PowerShell
For the next part of this Image Pipeline project, I needed to search Artifactory for all OS Image artifacts within a repo that have a specific property key, filter for the newest artifact with the same key value, download the items, and then upload OVA's to vCenter. When working on large automation projects, there's always... Continue Reading →
Large Scale Image Pipeline – Part 2 – Image Build Process
In the past couple of posts I've outlined our environment and our goals/requirements for an on-premises Image Pipeline process. I then went through setting up vSphere JSON Persistent Content Libraries to a single datastore for faster item sharing across multiple vCenter servers. In this post, I'll go over the Image Build process itself. I'm not... Continue Reading →
Large Scale Image Pipeline – Part 1 – Content Library Setup
Now that I've laid the groundwork for this image pipeline series, let's get started by setting up our vSphere Content Libraries. As stated in the overview, we have roughly 40 vCenter servers across multiple sites, multiple data centers within some of these sites, and multiple network boundaries within some data centers. The sites with multiple... Continue Reading →
Large Scale Image Pipeline – Overview
I've been working on multiple projects over the past couple years and most of them need to consume images of some flavor across multiple data centers (we have 10 in our metro with multiple network spaces). One team was managing vCenter templates (in case automation platform failed or a custom deployment needed) while an automation... Continue Reading →
Using CURL to Add Additional NIC to Packer Image
Recently I was working on a project to streamline virtual machine images for clustered databases. I was using Packer to create the base images and Terraform to deploy them for new requests. This all runs via Linux containers that do not have PowerCLI installed (though I could ask to get it installed). The issue I... Continue Reading →
Monitoring vCenter 6.7 Scheduled Backups with Log Insight
One of the great features within VCSA 6.7 is the ability to schedule daily backups. The only challenge is that there is no built-in notifications as to whether they succeeded or not. At times I've gone a few days (weeks) until I noticed they weren't successful so I decided to monitor the jobs with Log... Continue Reading →
Applying vSphere Encryption when cloning a VM
We are implementing vSphere Encryption on top of vSAN encryption in a specific solution area. The basic setup is a vSAN cluster in each of 10 data centers. The templates are in one data center and cloned to the clusters in each of the other data centers. We created the new storage policy called "VSAN-RAID5-FTT1-Encryption"... Continue Reading →
