Import-VApp Archives

Photon 2.0 is definitely a guest OS that is useful in a VMware vSphere environment. It is light-weight, easy to manage, security hardened and comes with the Docker daemon.
That last feature makes it an ideal environment to explore new applications, isolated from your live platforms. As an example, quite a few of us got to know PowerShell Core with VMware PowerCLI, while running it in a Docker container, well shielded from our other platforms.

There are numerous articles and blog posts that describe how set up a Photon 2.0 VM, but most of these use the ovftool or the vSphere Web Client to install it. Followed by quite of a bit of editing config files, to have your Photon 2.0 VM running the way you prefer it.
With the latest version of my Invoke-VMScriptPlus function, you can now automate this entire process, the SDDC way!

Update August 21st 2018

Added “reboot” action
Added optional Environment variables for the customisation scripts
Added Folder field for template destination

Continue reading Deploy Photon 2.0 – Part 1 →

Appliances are hot!

Each appliance, delivered as an OVA or OVF, can have one or more properties attached to it. These properties are mostly used to configure the appliance. In PowerCLI we have the Get-OvfConfiguration cmdlet. It returns the user configurable properties from an OVF or OVA file in a hash table.

But what about upgrading an appliance? Most, if not all, of the Ovf Properties are already entered for the older version of the appliance. Can’t we use that information to upgrade the appliance? And avoid having to retype all that information?

And to take away the suspense, of course, that can be done with a bit of PowerShell!

Continue reading Upgrade an Appliance with OvfTools →