I recently co-presented with William Lam a session on the vGhetto Scripts and Client at VMworld 2010. The PPC-07 talk was within the Technology Exchange for Developers sub-conference of VMworld 2010. For an extra few hundred dollars you were able to sit in on sessions by Carter Shankln, William Lam, and other VMware vSphere SDK developers. We wanted to wow our audience, which in the end I believe we did. We displayed and used the vGhetto Client from VMware vMA, my Mac OS X laptop, and an iPad. However, to get to the final set of demos required quite a bit of setup. I want to discuss this setup further so that others can duplicate what we did.
Hardware
The lab for the demos ran on three hardware devices. The first was an i7 Mac Book Pro with 8GBs of memory and a 512GB SSD. SSD was a great benefit for the demos as we will be running quite a few VMs. The second bit of hardware was of course an Apple iPad. The third however, no one really saw within the environment and was a Dlink DWL-G730AP. This last device is a USB or wall powered Access Point which provided DHCP within the demo environment as well as the ability to connect the iPad to the environment without needed to worry about whether or not the VMworld wireless was running.
Virtual Machines
The environment consisted of the following VMs:
- OpenFiler 2.3
- VMware vSphere ESX 4.1
- VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1
- VMware vCenter 4.1
- VMware vMA 4.1
These VMs ran within VMware Fusion 3.1.1 with 2 networks in use. The bridged network was connected to the AirPort device and then to the Dlink DWL-G730AP device. This network contained all the management appliances for each ESX host, OpenFiler, vCenter, and vMA. The second network was host-only and was for the vMotion and Fault Tolerance networks to be created by the demo scripts.
Even a demo should contain necessary security separation. You really need to demo using what you want to happen in reality. To that end, we never logged in as an Administrator or root user, but as the vMA410 and vi-admin users who had the proper permissions within the environment.
Software
The software we used was Perl based, which required us to ensure the proper bits were installed within MacOS X as well as VMware vMA. To that end, two new vGhetto Installer scripts were created: vghetto.sh and vghetto-osx.sh. These are available via SVN using:
svn co https://vghetto.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vghetto vghetto
The scripts are located within the installers directory. Each of these scripts setup the environment for running the vGhetto Client as well as the scripts. If you wish to use VNC from vMA then uncomment the last line of the vghetto script. This last line installs select components of X11R6 and Gnome within vMA as the Perl/TK vGhetto Client will not work with just the TWM window manager. I am sure there is a reduced set of packages that will work but we had limited time to organize this configuration.
What we found was that both MacOSX and vMA were missing quite a few pre-requisites to even use the vGhetto scripts. For MacOSX this also required the download of the vSphere SDK for Perl from the VMware download site. Then running the vghetto-osx.sh script from within the directory where you stored the installation image for the vSphere SDK. Not only would the script install dependencies but will also install the vSphere SDK for Perl when required to do so.
These two scripts do all the heavy lifting so that you can make easy use of the vGhetto scripts and Client. Actually, there is also a demoprep.sh script you can use to create the same demos used within PPC-O7.
Other than one slight problem with OpenFiler, all the demos ran without a hitch. We were even able to configure FT on a VM even when shared storage was not available.
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an author, analyst, developer, technologist, and business owner. Edward owns AstroArch Consulting, Inc., providing virtualization, security, network consulting and development and TVP Strategy where he is also an Analyst. Edward is the Moderator and Host of the Virtualization Security Podcast as well as a guru and moderator for the VMware Communities Forums, providing answers to security and configuration questions. Edward is working on new books on Virtualization.