xCAT 2.5 which vcl can be based off automatically configures ESXi 4
with ssh enabled. This is for running diskless installs.
On May 29, 2010, at 10:14 AM, Andy Kurth <andy_ku...@ncsu.edu> wrote:
It would be pretty easy to implement but requiring SSH poses some
legal/licensing questions, along with some technical problems.
There's a thread that discusses whether or not it violates the
VMware EULA to enable and use SSH, with no definitive answer:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1418182
Even if the EULA would not be violated by VCL managing "free" ESXi
via SSH, I'd be wary to devote much development time or make this
the recommended configuration because (a) the EULA may be changed in
the future to disallow it and (b) there is nothing preventing VMware
from taking away the SSH "Tech Support Mode" in the future, and (c)
there is no way to automate the enabling of SSH so every host will
have to be manually configured.
That said, I have enabled SSH on my ESXi test hosts and have found
it very useful. Instructions on how to enable SSH:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003677
Once enabled, the VCL code could do everything it needs by running
vim-cmd and other commands. This would be easy to implement. The
new code is very modular and contains 2 utility modules, VIX_API.pm
and vSphere_SDK.pm. These implement the functions to control the
VMs such as register, power_on, etc. We would need to implement
another utility module to perform the same functions via ESXi/SSH.
There will be some technical problems that will need to be
addressed. For example, you can create an authorized_keys file on
the ESXi host to login using an identity key but this file gets
deleted for some reason every time you reboot the ESXi host.
-Andy
Ryan Johnson wrote:
I was going through some of the posts on the vmware forums.
Apparently one
could ssh into the ESXi host itself and use the vimsh wrapper to
administer
virtual machines. Not sure how hard this would be to implement.
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/203414
