Satellite userdata provisioning template injects customisation specification identity information Satellite calls Vcenter to clone VM template User provisions VM(s) via the UI, API or hammer Once the environment is prepared, the provisioning workflow at a high-level is: Prepare provisioning templates (userdata and cloud-init)Ĭonfigure the Operating System to use the userdata and cloud-init templates

Install the Foreman Userdata Plug-in and restart Satellite At a high-level we need to:Ĭreate a Content View and add a Repository to itĬreate Activation Keys and add Subscription In order to set up the initial environment, there are a few moving parts to set up. Note: for those familiar with earlier releases of VCSA, the memory footprint for even a Tiny VCSA is substantial. It is possible to reproduce this in a lab-like environment using nested virtualisation but this requires:Ģ00GB of disk, thin provisioned (> 670 GB if thick provisioned)Ī nested ESX host with enough memory to run the VCSA in addition to VMs It’s not currently a supported Red Hat component so be aware of this if you plan to use it.

This plugin is currently being merged into Foreman core, it will likely appear in future Satellite 6 releases.

Due to environmental constraints, we could not use Ansible, REX or SSH finish templates for post-provisioning configuration.Īs a result we ended up with a solution using the upstream Foreman Userdata plug-in to further customise provisioned hosts via userdata injection for VMware customisation specification and cloud-init to ‘phone-home’. There are a number of different Red Hat technologies that can all be used to provision and configure VMware virtual machines.Įach has its own strengths, and scenarios where one may be favoured over another, framed by technical requirements, environmental constraints and local preferences.ĭuring a recent engagement, we wanted to use Satellite to bulk-provision relatively large numbers of VMs to VMware Vcenter/ESX. The information may no longer be current. For up-to-date documentation on using the VMware vSphere Cloud-init and Userdata Templates for Provisioning, click here. To resolve this issue, log in directly to each ESXi host that has access to the inactive datastore and manually remove it.This article was originally published on the Red Hat Customer Portal. CannotRemove datastore ‘datastore_name’ because Storage I/O control is enabled on it. ‘Call “HostDatastoreSystem.RemoveDatastore” form object “datastoreSystem-28” on vCenter Server “xxxx” failed. Unmounting the datastore in vCenter Server fails with the error: The backend storage volume corresponding to the datastore has been removed and the datastore appears as Inactive, when I want to remove (via vSphere Client connected to vCenter server) the NFS datastore I receive this error message:

Vmware esxi 6 still showing 5.5 image profile