Tag: #PowerShell

Code Stream Nested Esxi pipeline Part 2

In this second part, I’ll discuss the actual Code Stream pipeline.

As stated before, the inspiration was William Lams wonderful Power Shell scripts to deploy a nested environment from a CLI. His original logic was retained as much as possible, however due to the nature of K8S a few things had to be changed. I’ll try to address those as they come up.

After some thought I decided to NOT allow the requester to select the amount of Memory, vCPU, or VSAN size. Each Esxi host has 24G of Ram, 4 vCPU, and contributes a touch over 100G to the VSAN. The resulting cluster has 72G of RAM, 12 vCPUs and a roughly 300G VSAN. Only Standard vSwitches are configured in each host.

The code, pipeline and other information is available on this github repo.

Deployment of the Esxi hosts is initiated by ‘deployNestedEsxi.ps1’. There are few changes from the original script.

  1. The OVA configuration is only grabbed once. Then only the specific host settings (IP Address and Name are changed.
  2. The hosts are moved into a vApp once built.
  3. The NetworkAdapter settings are performed after deployment.
  4. Persisted the log to /var/workspace_cache/logs/vsphere-deployment-$BUILDTIME.log.

Deployment of the vCSA is handled by ‘deployVcsa.ps1’ Some notable changes from the original code include.

  1. Hardcoded the SSO username to administrator@vsphere.local.
  2. Hardcoded the size to ‘tiny’.
  3. Save the log file to /var/workspace_cache/logs/NestedVcsa-$BUILDTIME.log.
  4. Save the configuration template to /var/workspace_cache/vcsajson/NestedVcsa-$BUILDTIME.json.
  5. Move the VCSA into the vApp after deployment is complete.

And finally ‘configureVc.ps1’ sets up the Cluster and VSAN. Some changed include.

  1. Hardcoded the Datacenter name (DC), and Cluster (CL1).
  2. Import the Esxi hosts by IP (No DNS records setup for the hosts or vCenter).
  3. Append the configuration results to /var/workspace_cache/logs/vsphere-deployment-$BUILDTIME.log.

So there you go, down and simple Code Stream pipeline to deploy a nested vSphere environment in about an hour.

Stay tuned. The next article will include an NSX-T deployment.

Cloud Extensibility Appliance vRO Properties using PowerShell

In this article I’ll show you how to return JSON as a vRO Property type using vRA Cloud Extensibility Proxy (CEXP) vRO PowerShell 7 scriptable tasks.

First a couple of notes about the CEXP.

  • It is BIG, 32GB of RAM. However my lab instance is using less than 7 GB active memory.
  • 8 vCPU, and runs about 50% on average.
  • It deploys with 4 disks, using a tad less than 210 GB.

Why PowerShell 7? Well it was a design decision based on the customers PS proficiency.

Now down to the good stuff. Here are the details of this basic workflow using PowerShell 7 as Scriptable Tasks.

  • Get a new vRA Cloud Bearer Token
    • Save it, along with other common header values to an output variable named ‘headers’ (Properties)
  • The second scriptable task will use the header and apiEndpoint to GET the vRAC version information (About).
    • Then save version information to an output variable named ‘vRacAbout’ (Properties)

Getting (actually POST) the bearerToken is fairly simple. Here is the code for the first task.

function Handler($context, $inputs) {
    <#
    .PARAMETER $inputs.refreshToken (SecureString)
        vRAC Refresh Token

    .PARAMETER $inputs.apiEndpoint (String)
        vRAC Base API URL

    .OUTPUT headers (Properties)
        Headers including the bearerToken

    #>
    $body = @{ refreshToken = $inputs.refreshToken } | ConvertTo-Json

    $headers = @{'Accept' = 'application/json'
                'Content-Type' = 'application/json'}
    
    $Uri = $inputs.apiEndpoint + "/iaas/api/login"
    $requestResponse = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $Uri -Method Post -Body $body -Headers $headers 

    $bearerToken = "Bearer " + $requestResponse.token 
    $authorization = @{ Authorization = $bearerToken}
    $headers += $authorization

    $output=@{headers = $headers}

    return $output
}

The second task consumes the headers produced by the first task, then GET(s) the Version Information from the vRA Cloud About route (‘/iaas/api/about’). The results are then returned as the vRacAbout (Properties) variable.

function Handler($context, $inputs) {
    <#
    .PARAMETER $inputs.headers (Properties)
        vRAC Refresh Token

    .PARAMETER $inputs.apiEndpoint (String)
        vRAC Base API URL

    .OUTPUT vRacAbout (Properties)
        vRAC version information from the About route

    #>
    $requestUri += $inputs.apiEndpoint + "/iaas/api/about"
    $requestResponse = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $requestUri -Method Get -Headers $headers

    $output=@{vRacAbout = $requestResponse}

    return $output
}

Here, you can see the output variables for both tasks are populated. Pretty cool.

As you can see, using the vRO Properties type is fairly simple using the PowerShell on CEXP vRO.

The working workflow package is available here.

Happy coding.