th3architect / coreos-vmware

CoreOS VMware images deployment

CoreOS VMware images deployment

Update, 20141107

William Lam from VMware picked this up pretty quick and created his own, far better script around fetching of the images. Check his blog-post: How to quickly deploy new CoreOS Image w/VMware Tools on ESXi?

However, see this Twitter-conversation where he left off (for now).
In short: you won't be able to login if you don't attach a custom ISO to the VM(s)!

What

Latest releases of CoreOS' VMware-images now include open-vm-tools.
This is a small project to use these instead of the 'vmware_insecure' images, and be prepared for the future. Check out this GitHub-comment: This only applies to the vmware image, the older vmware_insecure image will eventually be killed off.

Killed off ... time to get started!

How

You need 2 files from CoreOS, e.g. at http://alpha.release.core-os.net/amd64-usr/current/

• coreos_production_vmware.vmx
• coreos_production_vmware_image.vmdk.bz2

See deploy_coreos04_on_esxi.sh for some details:

• you need to bunzip2 the .vmdk on a different host than the ESXi-server
• create VM-folder by hand on ESXi: mkdir -p ${DATASTORE_PATH}/${VM_NAME}
• SCP (secure copy) the deflated .vmdk to the ESXi datastore
• a DHCP-reservation for a fixed IP-address is preferred

To enable a user (login-account), etcd and fleet add an ISO-image to the VM, as a config-drive with the label config-2.
Edit file user_data_04 for specific settings (change IP-address, GitHub-name) and file 04_make_ISO.sh to create the ISO-image from these settings. My ISO-images are 96K in size.

Hint: if you need mkisofs on OS X, install 'dvdrtools' with Homebrew: brew install dvdrtools.

Deploy

You can deploy directly on ESXi in sub-directory templates on the datastore. You need to create this directory by hand.

/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/templates # ./deploy_coreos04_on_esxi.sh
Destination disk format: VMFS thin-provisioned
Cloning disk 'coreos_production_vmware_image.vmdk'...
Clone: 100% done.
Powering on VM:
Reset VM:

After this, power down the VM and add the ISO-image. Restart the VM.
You can login with your Github-ID and its SSH-keys.

Number five four is alive

I choose coreos04 in the scripts, because I already had 3 CoreOS-hosts running as 'vmware_insecure' images. But number 4 seems to be playing along nicely with the rest:

hbokh@coreos04 ~ $ fleetctl list-machines  
MACHINE		IP		    METADATA  
6ed4b296...	192.168.1.3	-  
85941ee5...	192.168.1.4	-  
85f337f8...	192.168.1.2	-  
90924c46...	192.168.1.1	-

Note: The $private_ipv4 and $public_ipv4 substitution variables referenced in other documents are not supported on VMware. See this link.

This is where VMware is lacking a metadata service (as opposed to Vagrant / Virtualbox and OpenStack). So you will need a different and unique small ISO-image for EVERY separate CoreOS guest on VMware.

Issues

• No bunzip2 on VMware ESXi. You'll have to deflate the .vmdk on a different system and SCP it over.

Thanks

Originally inspired by & taken from deploy_coreos_on_esxi.sh, by William Lam.