esxi-vm-deploy

Offering a golang program to automate vm installation on a esxi host. The program will be asking for some informations, templating a .vmk file, creating a virtual disk and installing operating system via embedded BOOTP python server. Before starting the automatic deployment of virtual machines you will need to tune up your system in order to be able to run program. To run this program you will need:

• go > 1.13
• ansible >= 2.7

Automatic System Setup

If you are running Debian, in order to setup the system and be able to running golang program you can run the script below (needs sudo privilege on host) for automatic setup or you can follow the step-by-step guide in "Manual Setup" section

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lucabodd/esxi-vm-deploy/master/setup/ESXi-vm-deploy-install.sh | bash

Manual System Setup

If automatic system setup fails, or you want to setup the system manually, you can setup the system following the steps below. In order to setup the system and being able to running golang program you will need to follow the following steps: install ansible via package manager (Debian):

sudo apt-get install ansible

Install golang from sources

wget https://dl.google.com/go/go1.14.4.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xvf go1.14.4.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo mv go /usr/local
rm -rf go

Install esxi-vm-deploy

go get github.com/lucabodd/esxi-vm-deploy
go install github.com/lucabodd/esxi-vm-deploy

In some cases you might need to export this environment vars

export GOROOT=/usr/local/go
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$GOROOT/bin:$PATH

Update

As of today updates will be released on github.com, in order to update the program you can run the following command

go get -u github.com/lucabodd/esxi-vm-deploy

Usage

Usage is described running the program with the help flag. Before running the program, please consider the following checklist:

• "helper" host and "vm-ip" must be in the same target subnet (unless you are able to broadcast UDP packets :67,:68 outside the helper's server)
• one helper can deploy one vm per time, if you want to deploy more than one VM at once, you'll need more helpers (or wait :'))

Usage: esxi-vm-deploy [OPTIONS]
  -cpu string
        Specify RAM size (default "2")
  -disk-size string
        Virtual machine Disk size (default "50")
  -esxi string
        ESXi Hypervisor
  -help
        prints this help message
  -helper string
        BOOTP server address, specified host will provide configurations to booting (PXE) virtual machine
  -ip string
        Virtual machine IP address
  -name string
        Specify virtual machine name
  -os string
        Specify virtual machine OS available: debian9-64, debian10-64, debian11-64 (default "debian11-64")
  -ram string
        Specify RAM size (default "16")
  -use-custom-mirror string
        Define a custom mirror where images will be retriven from. Mirror must be defined as full path, point to amd64 directori, which must contain initrd.gz file (eg: http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/debian-installer or https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/amd64/daily/netboot/debian-installer/amd64/ )
  -use-default-mirror
        Download debian images from mirror, default mirror used is http://ftp.nl.debian.org if you want to use an alternative mirror use --mirror flag
  -v    enable verbose mode
  -version
        Display current version of script
  -vi-preseed
        edit local preseed file (changes will be overwritten during updates)
One ore more required flag has not been prodided.
Note that using less flag than required could lead program into errors
Omit flags only if you are aware of what are you doin'
[EXAMPLES]
- Creation of machine with custom hardware
esxi-vm-deploy --esxi [ESXi host defined in ssh config] -H [unix host defined in ssh config]  --ip [ip of new machine] --name [name of new machine] --ram 8  --disk-size 16 --cpu 4
- Creation of machine with default values 3 CPU 50GB Disk 16GB RAM
esxi-vm-deploy --esxi [ESXi host defined in ssh config] -H [unix host defined in ssh config]  --ip [ip of new machine] --name [name of new machine]
- Creation of machine with default values 3 CPU 50GB Disk 16GB RAM using the default mirror (http://ftp.nl.debian.org/)
esxi-vm-deploy --esxi [ESXi host defined in ssh config] -H [unix host defined in ssh config]  --ip [ip of new machine] --name [name of new machine] --use-default-mirror
- Creation of machine with default values 3 CPU 50GB Disk 16GB RAM using a custom mirror
esxi-vm-deploy --esxi [ESXi host defined in ssh config] -H [unix host defined in ssh config]  --ip [ip of new machine] --name [name of new machine] --os debian9-64 --use-custom-mirror http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stretch/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/

Maintainance

To maintain this tool you need to periodically update debian netboot images in order to allow the the kernel version of the installer to match the version available in the debian archives. Download the new installer version from debian repos.

wget --recursive --no-parent -nH --cut-dirs=8 --reject html,tmp http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/stretch/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/

and put the debian-installer directory inside esxi-vm-deploy/roles/vm-deploy/files/linux/images/debian[version]-64