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We're rolling out a new testbed in the office, and need to spin up ~30-40 Linux VMs (mostly RHEL 5/6, some SuSE). Running on VMware ESXi 5.5, we'd like to automate the process. There's a pre-made answer file for the installer, the question is how to have VMware tell the script how to configure the machine (based on hostname).

Basically, there should be some PowerCLI script for VMware that creates machines and mounts the installer .iso. It should then start the machine, pass some parameters to the answer file and be off and running (pending completion, it should kick off the next one).

Any ideas/best practices? Have we missed anything?

Edit: To be clear the question is this: "how do I pass parameters from the VMware PowerCLI to an unattended installer answer file?"

agentroadkill
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Pity you're not on v6, it has this thing called Instant Clone that would speed up this kind of deployment. Anyway have you thought about just using a DHCP/dynamic-DNS solution for this kind of thing, you can pipe through a unique MAC to each VM which would then feed the DHCP to get hostname/IP/DNS details and then register with a dynamic DNS server once available. Certainly this kind of thing can work well but obviously needs some work.

Chopper3
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I can't speak on the PowerCLI side, but there are other options to automate the deployment/management of multiple VMs.

Two great tools are Chef and Puppet. Makes live easy by specifying the template of the server you want, with some basic parameters then it takes care of the rest. Even makes updating and tracking software on the servers easy as well.

BenD10
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  • I've used both these services before. While I agree they're great, they come with their own setup and configuration delays that in this case are overkill, these various machines will all be running as appliances once configured. The extra overhead of another server to administer makes this harder than sitting in front of the VM and manually typing the hostname for each machine. – agentroadkill Jul 20 '16 at 20:20