Provisioning virtual machines in VMware vSphere

Install the VMware compute resource provider on your orcharhino Server:

# orcharhino-installer --enable-foreman-compute-vmware

Optional: In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Administer > About and select the compute resources tab to verify the installation of the VMware plug-in.

In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Infrastructure > Compute Resources, and in the Compute Resources window, click Create Compute Resource.

In the Name field, enter a name for the resource.

From the Provider list, select VMware.

In the Description field, enter a description for the resource.

In the VCenter/Server field, enter the IP address or host name of the vCenter server.

In the User field, enter the user name with permission to access the vCenter’s resources.

In the Password field, enter the password for the user.

Click Load Datacenters to populate the list of data centers from your VMware vSphere environment.

From the Datacenter list, select a specific data center to manage from this list.

In the Fingerprint field, ensure that this field is populated with the fingerprint from the data center.

From the Display Type list, select a console type, for example, VNC or VMRC. Note that VNC consoles are unsupported on VMware ESXi 6.5 and later.

Optional: In the VNC Console Passwords field, select the Set a randomly generated password on the display connection checkbox to secure console access for new hosts with a randomly generated password. You can retrieve the password for the VNC console to access guest virtual machine console from the libvirtd host from the output of the following command:

# virsh edit your_VM_name
<graphics type='vnc' port='-1' autoport='yes' listen='0.0.0.0' passwd='your_randomly_generated_password'>

From the Enable Caching list, you can select whether to enable caching of compute resources. For more information, see Caching of Compute Resources.

Click the Locations and Organizations tabs and verify that the values are automatically set to your current context. You can also add additional contexts.

Click Submit to save the connection.

In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Infrastructure > Compute Resources.

Select your Vmware compute resource.

Click Create Image.

In the Name field, enter a name for the image.

From the Operating System list, select the base operating system of the image.

From the Architecture list, select the operating system architecture.

In the Username field, enter the SSH user name for image access. By default, this is set to root.

If your image supports user data input such as cloud-init data, click the User data checkbox.

Optional: In the Password field, enter the SSH password to access the image.

From the Image list, select an image from VMware.

Click Submit to save the image details.

In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Infrastructure > Compute Profiles.

Select a compute profile.

Select a Vmware compute resource.

In the CPUs field, enter the number of CPUs to allocate to the host.

In the Cores per socket field, enter the number of cores to allocate to each CPU.

In the Memory field, enter the amount of memory in MiB to allocate to the host.

In the Firmware checkbox, select either BIOS or UEFI as firmware for the host. By default, this is set to automatic.

In the Cluster list, select the name of the target host cluster on the VMware environment.

From the Resource pool list, select an available resource allocations for the host.

In the Folder list, select the folder to organize the host.

From the Guest OS list, select the operating system you want to use in VMware vSphere.

From the Virtual H/W version list, select the underlying VMware hardware abstraction to use for virtual machines.

If you want to add more memory while the virtual machine is powered on, select the Memory hot add checkbox.

If you want to add more CPUs while the virtual machine is powered on, select the CPU hot add checkbox.

If you want to add a CD-ROM drive, select the CD-ROM drive checkbox.

From the Boot order list, define the order in which the virtual machines tried to boot.

Optional: In the Annotation Notes field, enter an arbitrary description.

If you use image-based provisioning, select the image from the Image list.

From the SCSI controller list, select the disk access method for the host.

If you want to use eager zero thick provisioning, select the Eager zero checkbox. By default, the disk uses lazy zero thick provisioning.

From the Network Interfaces list, select the network parameters for the host’s network interface. At least one interface must point to a orcharhino Proxy-managed network.

Optional: Click Add Interface to create another network interfaces.

Click Submit to save the compute profile.

Create a compute profile:

# hammer compute-profile create --name "My_Compute_Profile"

Set VMware details to a compute profile:

# hammer compute-profile values create \
--compute-attributes "cpus=1,corespersocket=2,memory_mb=1024,cluster=MyCluster,path=MyVMs,start=true" \
--compute-profile "My_Compute_Profile" \
--compute-resource "My_VMware" \
--interface "compute_type=VirtualE1000,compute_network=mynetwork \
--volume "size_gb=20G,datastore=Data,name=myharddisk,thin=true"

In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Hosts > Create Host.

In the Name field, enter a name for the host.

Optional: Click the Organization tab and change the organization context to match your requirement.

Optional: Click the Location tab and change the location context to match your requirement.

From the Host Group list, select a host group that you want to assign your host to. That host group will populate the form.

From the Deploy on list, select the VMware vSphere connection.

From the Compute Profile list, select a profile to use to automatically populate virtual machine-based settings.

Click the Interfaces tab, and on the interface of the host, click Edit.

Verify that the fields are populated with values. Note in particular:

In the interface window, review the VMware-specific fields that are populated with settings from our compute profile. Modify these settings to suit your needs.

Click OK to save. To add another interface, click Add Interface. You can select only one interface for Provision and Primary.

Click the Operating System tab, and confirm that all fields automatically contain values.

Select the Provisioning Method that you want:

Click Resolve in Provisioning templates to check the new host can identify the right provisioning templates to use.

Click the Virtual Machine tab and confirm that these settings are populated with details from the host group and compute profile. Modify these settings to suit your requirements.

Click the Parameters tab and ensure that a parameter exists that provides an activation key. If a parameter does not exist, click + Add Parameter. In the field Name, enter kt_activation_keys. In the field Value, enter the name of the activation key used to register the Content Hosts.

Click Submit to provision your host on VMware.

In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Hosts > Templates > Provisioning Templates.

Search for the CloudInit default template and click its name.

Click the Association tab.

Select all operating systems to which the template applies and click Submit.

Repeat the steps above for the UserData open-vm-tools template.

Navigate to Hosts > Provisioning Setup > Operating Systems.

Select the operating system that you want to use for provisioning.

Click the Templates tab.

From the Cloud-init template list, select CloudInit default.

From the User data template list, select UserData open-vm-tools.

Click Submit to save the changes.

On the virtual machine that you use to create the image, install the required packages:

# dnf install cloud-init open-vm-tools perl-interpreter perl-File-Temp

Disable network configuration by cloud-init:

# cat << EOM > /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/01_network.cfg
network:
  config: disabled
EOM

Configure cloud-init to fetch data from orcharhino:

# cat << EOM > /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/10_datasource.cfg
datasource_list: [NoCloud]
datasource:
  NoCloud:
    seedfrom: https://orcharhino.example.com/userdata/
EOM

Configure modules to use in cloud-init:

# cat << EOM > /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg
cloud_init_modules:
 - bootcmd
 - ssh

cloud_config_modules:
 - runcmd

cloud_final_modules:
 - scripts-per-once
 - scripts-per-boot
 - scripts-per-instance
 - scripts-user
 - phone-home

system_info:
  distro: rhel
  paths:
    cloud_dir: /var/lib/cloud
    templates_dir: /etc/cloud/templates
  ssh_svcname: sshd
EOM

Enable the CA certificates for the image:

# update-ca-trust enable

Download the katello-server-ca.crt file from orcharhino Server:

# wget -O /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/cloud-init-ca.crt https://orcharhino.example.com/pub/katello-server-ca.crt

Update the record of certificates:

# update-ca-trust extract

Clean the image:

# systemctl stop rsyslog
# systemctl stop auditd
# package-cleanup --oldkernels --count=1
# dnf clean all

Reduce logspace, remove old logs, and truncate logs:

# logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf
# rm -f /var/log/*-???????? /var/log/*.gz
# rm -f /var/log/dmesg.old
# rm -rf /var/log/anaconda
# cat /dev/null > /var/log/audit/audit.log
# cat /dev/null > /var/log/wtmp
# cat /dev/null > /var/log/lastlog
# cat /dev/null > /var/log/grubby

Remove udev hardware rules:

# rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/70*

Remove the ifcfg scripts related to existing network configurations:

# rm -f /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens*
# rm -f /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*

Remove the SSH host keys:

# rm -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*

Remove root user’s SSH history:

# rm -rf ~root/.ssh/known_hosts

Remove root user’s shell history:

# rm -f ~root/.bash_history
# unset HISTFILE

Create an image from this virtual machine.

Add your image to orcharhino.

In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Infrastructure > Compute Resources.

Select your VMware provider.

On the Virtual Machines tab, click Delete from the Actions menu. This deletes the virtual machine from the VMware compute resource while retaining any associated hosts within orcharhino. If you want to delete the orphaned host, navigate to Hosts > All Hosts and delete the host manually.

In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Infrastructure > Compute Resources.

Select your VMware compute resource.

On the Virtual Machines tab, click Import as managed Host or Import as unmanaged Host from the Actions menu. The following page looks identical to creating a host with the compute resource being already selected. For more information, see Creating a host in orcharhino in Managing Hosts.

Click Submit to import the virtual machine into orcharhino.