CyberGround

As you can see in my previous post, installing VMware vSphere SDK for Perl 6.5 or 6.7 to a CentOS (or any RHEL) 7 system is a pain in your ass. If you would like to install it any Debian (like Ubuntu) system it would be more difficult for you. This is the reason why I wrote this post, I will guide you through this operation.

Did you ever tried to install the VMware vSphere SDK for Perl 6.5 or 6.7 to a CentOS (or any RHEL) 7 system? Yes, it will be a pain in your ass. In CentOS 6 systems, the installer has precompiled Perl modules and will install it. But in CentOS (or any RHEL) 7 systems, you will need to get and compile them from CPAN. If you try to make this way, you will have to face many issues, but it could be another entire blog post.

Hopefully, I have find a way how can you install all of the Perl modules via yum and you don’t need to use (or even install) CPAN. Then your application which calls the SDK for Perl scripts will work correctly without issues.

If you read my previous post about guest optimization, you should see how can you customize your Windows or Linux guest with a modified vmclone.pl script. However, it can’t be used for all cases. It is because vmclone.pl will call the guest customization function in the vSphere environment which is not available for all distributions (Debian, for example) and it has some limitations. (like you cannot set the root password for Linux guests)

I must confess that I like the VSphere’s Perl SDK while I set some automation job, but one of its bottleneck is the purely wrote example scripts. If you would like to deploy a template, you should use vmclone.pl with its functions and you will be done. It is great but what about the VM’s network settings? If you deploy a Windows guest, you can set up the network via vmclone.pl of course, but you need to enter it into a domain. What about deploying a Linux server? you are out of luck, because you cannot set up the networking.

After digging into the web, I found vmclone2.pl which seems to be useful, but it was wrote at 2010, and its biggest problem is that will not work on VSphere 6.x environment and it is only useful for Linux VM deploying. As far as I know, you are out of options, so if you would like to customize your Windows (without entering into domain) and Linux guest in the same script, you need to write your own Perl code…

As a hosting provider’s systems engineer, I had the task to give console access to our customer’s virtual machines. Because we built our vSphere network infrastructure to a private network of course, therefore we did not give vCenter access to our customers directly, they have a separated public management server and web interface which connects to this private network. Between the public user interface and private network, we are using the vSphere Perl SDK to manage customer commands. (like deploy vm, poweron, poweroff, …)

I’m pretty sure this scenario is familiar most of you who works in hosting environment, so the only one question is, how to set up the console and give it to the customers? You have plenty of options available, but most of them did not work by the way. :)