2014-07-30

gatewayInsertExtract v3

[UPDATE NOTE: The work creating, providing and supporting scripts for ESX/ESXi/vCenter has been discontinued. Apologies for the inconvenience.]
Script to insert or extract Gateway vms into the linked-clone Pods.

Note this script only operates with vms, the Operating System inside the vm as well as its configuration is up to you.

The gateway vms are there to provide external connectivity to the vms inside the Pod. Without it you could use the Remote Console to access each one of the vms but you may not want your students to be using the vSphere (Web) Client.

Those Gateway vms would have at least 2 NICs, one connected to the Pod and one to the external network from where the students can access their own vms.

The reason to extract them is because each one may contain some networking configuration that may be reused across training sessions. So before deleting the Pods, you extract them to preserve them. And when the Pods for the new training are ready you insert them back into the pods. This works well whether the Pods are in a DRS-cluster or in standalone hosts, as far as the Gateway vms were created in similar conditions.


First version (outdated)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf9ZO0atjNo

The second version has less parameters and its easier to use.
It is used in this video together with other scripts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAqGE6sROkU

A third version allows to insert/extract the Gateway vms into Pods of different names.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF1tr-YZqNw



Some clients use Monowall [1] for the Gateway vm and pfSense [2] for the outer router. The options, combinations and tools are endless.

[1] http://m0n0.ch/wall/
[2] www.pfsense.org



Together with this, I provide another script for doing NIC connectivity changes over a number of vms.

Some clients had complex setups where one NIC in specific vms had to be connected to a singular network. With this script you can modify the NIC connectivity of those vms in one go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owJvyOUveA