Stateless ESXi-Arm

This is the custom extra.tgz payload which is included as part of the ESXi-Arm boot process and handles the logic of automatically adding an ESXi-Arm host to a vCenter Server and performs any post-boot customizations. These scripts have been designed to be generic and retrieves the actual configurations from a remote endpoint which is hosted on a web server.

Here is the expected structure of the files when it is extracted onto the ESXi-Arm filesystem:

etc
└── rc.local.d
    ├── join-vcenter.py
    └── local.sh

To create the exta.tgz, run the following command:

# tar -czvf extra.tgz etc/
# chmod 655 extra.tgz

You can download the pre-packaged extra.tgz or you can manually create your own. Just make sure you are using GNU tar when creating the payload.

When /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh runs, it will process the kernel boot options which will tell it where to find both the esxi-arm-config.json and esxi-arm-extra-config.sh configuration files.

/var/www/html/
├── esxi-arm-config.json
├── esxi-arm-extra-config.sh

Here is an example of the esxi-arm-config.json which tells the ESXi-Arm host which vCenter Server to join along with NTP configuration as this is required prior to joining. This is completely optional and is controlled by the joinVC=true kernel boot option

{
	"vcenter_server": "192.168.30.200",
	"vcenter_user": "vc-join@vsphere.local",
	"vcenter_pass": "VMware1!",
	"vcenter_datacenter": "Arm-Datacenter",
	"vcenter_cluster": "Arm-Cluster",
	"ntp_server": "pool.ntp.org"
}

Here is an example of the esxi-arm-extra-config.sh which is nothing more than basic shell script that contains commands that would be executed on the ESXi-Arm Shell for additional configurations. This is completely optional and is controlled by the runExtraConfig=true kernel boot option

#!/bin/sh

# Suppress UI Warnings
esxcli system settings advanced set -o /UserVars/SuppressShellWarning -i 1
esxcli system settings advanced set -o /UserVars/SuppressCoredumpWarning -i 1