CoreOS VMware images deployment

Update, 20141107

William Lam from VMware picked this up pretty quick and created his own, far better script around fetching of the images. Check his blog-post: How to quickly deploy new CoreOS Image w/VMware Tools on ESXi?

However, see this Twitter-conversation where he left off (for now).
In short: you won't be able to login if you don't attach a custom ISO to the VM(s)!

What

Latest releases of CoreOS' VMware-images now include open-vm-tools.
This is a small project to use these instead of the 'vmware_insecure' images, and be prepared for the future. Check out this GitHub-comment: This only applies to the vmware image, the older vmware_insecure image will eventually be killed off.

Killed off ... time to get started!

How

You need 2 files from CoreOS, e.g. at http://alpha.release.core-os.net/amd64-usr/current/

• coreos_production_vmware.vmx
• coreos_production_vmware_image.vmdk.bz2

See deploy_coreos04_on_esxi.sh for some details:

• you need to bunzip2 the .vmdk on a different host than the ESXi-server
• create VM-folder by hand on ESXi: mkdir -p ${DATASTORE_PATH}/${VM_NAME}
• SCP (secure copy) the deflated .vmdk to the ESXi datastore
• a DHCP-reservation for a fixed IP-address is preferred

To enable a user (login-account), etcd and fleet add an ISO-image to the VM, as a config-drive with the label config-2.
Edit file user_data_04 for specific settings (change IP-address, GitHub-name) and file 04_make_ISO.sh to create the ISO-image from these settings. My ISO-images are 96K in size.

Hint: if you need mkisofs on OS X, install 'dvdrtools' with Homebrew: brew install dvdrtools.

Deploy

You can deploy directly on ESXi in sub-directory templates on the datastore. You need to create this directory by hand.

/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/templates # ./deploy_coreos04_on_esxi.sh
Destination disk format: VMFS thin-provisioned
Cloning disk 'coreos_production_vmware_image.vmdk'...
Clone: 100% done.
Powering on VM:
Reset VM:

After this, power down the VM and add the ISO-image. Restart the VM.
You can login with your Github-ID and its SSH-keys.

Number five four is alive

I choose coreos04 in the scripts, because I already had 3 CoreOS-hosts running as 'vmware_insecure' images. But number 4 seems to be playing along nicely with the rest:

hbokh@coreos04 ~ $ fleetctl list-machines  
MACHINE		IP		    METADATA  
6ed4b296...	192.168.1.3	-  
85941ee5...	192.168.1.4	-  
85f337f8...	192.168.1.2	-  
90924c46...	192.168.1.1	-

Note: The $private_ipv4 and $public_ipv4 substitution variables referenced in other documents are not supported on VMware. See this link.

This is where VMware is lacking a metadata service (as opposed to Vagrant / Virtualbox and OpenStack). So you will need a different and unique small ISO-image for EVERY separate CoreOS guest on VMware.

Issues

• No bunzip2 on VMware ESXi. You'll have to deflate the .vmdk on a different system and SCP it over.

Thanks

Originally inspired by & taken from deploy_coreos_on_esxi.sh, by William Lam.