My Virtual Way: My First ESXi Experience

This post will focus on my hands-on experience with vSphere, taking my VMware VMs (I created on our Ravello’s ESXi) and eventually deploying them on AWS EC2 (as you might remember from my last post in the VCA-DCV certification series, I didn’t get as much hands-on experience as I would have liked, and the whole thing seemed a little amorphic at the time).

I went to Israel a couple of weeks ago and worked in our Israeli Ravello office. I already mentioned that these guys KNOW what they’re talking about, so I thought I’d take advantage of it and get some hands-on experience with vSphere.

The exercise:

1. Create a 2-VM application running on ESXi in the datacenter in Israel
2. Figure out how to take them and put them and publish them in AWS. So
   1. In Ravello - define the application
   2. publish it
   3. create a blueprint
   4. access the application (how to enable http access if it's a web server, how to enable ssh to them, etc.)

Granted this exercise is a slight detour in my VCA-DCV training, but it was for the sake of not needing additional hardware going forward, so sort of an essential step.

It was supposed to be a fun little exercise. Well.

I installed the vSphere 4.1 client and got access to Ravello’s datacenter. I started by creating an Ubuntu VM. The point was getting two machines running, creating an application on them, and have it run on ESXi. The easy way was probably to create a VM twice. But I’m learning, so we thought I might as well try to clone the thing, take a snapshot of it and create a new VM from the first I created.

I was working with the vSphere client trial edition. It seemed that the regular way to create a VM from a snapshot didn’t really exist there, so on to find some way of taking a snapshot. I stumbled upon this simple explanation. It looked easy breezy enough, with screenshots that actually corresponded to what I saw on my computer. It would have been perfect had I not tried to first take a snapshot of the VM, not realizing that it wouldn’t do me any good.

I got stuck with an error that some files were missing after I finished copying all the files I thought I should copy. Chen, expert in building the cloud test lab, came to the rescue (not without slightly teasing me for still being in roughly the same spot he left me a couple of hours prior. Fair enough): “Did you take a snapshot?” Yes, I did. “Delete it. Try to copy and start the VM”. I was never happier to see Linux running. Success (I used this guide to coping a VM).

So now I have two machines running. Not only running, they’re running Linux. But still the point is to create an application and have it run on these things. However, I had to pause and go back to the my day job that doesn’t include uploading VMs anywhere. So I’ll leave it here and in the next post, we’ll see if I can get Spring’s Pet Clinic to run in our datacenter, and if all goes well, by the end of it I’ll have a VMware based application running on AWS with the help of Ravello.

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