Audio transcript: VM IP Management for Virtual Devices Incompatible with VMware Tools

Hello everyone and welcome!  My name is Hannah Warren.  I’m here today for Navisite, giving a brief demonstration of our Navisite Cloud Director or NCD platform which you can access through our Proximity login portal. 

Just a quick note about today's tutorial: this is a general level tutorial with the product in its current iteration, so if you have specific questions or issues with your environment please make sure that you contact our customer service department. For a more detailed tutorial you can always visit our knowledge base, which is a link on the screen and also in the video description below. And with that, let's get started.

In this video we'll discuss how you can reflect the IP address of the VM with an OS that's incompatible with VMware tools. It is possible to do this in NCD with just a few extra steps. For demo purposes today we'll be using this Ubuntu VM that we've clever labeled ZombieVM because it’s had its brain removed, so to speak. It's had its VMware tools stripped off of it. And just a quick note that your process may vary slightly depending on your particular exception case. Some typical use cases for this tend to be some devices like NetScalers – so your particular case may vary. We’ll be using this ZombieVM for today's tutorial.

So I’m at my VM detail page. What I'm going to do first is open up the console. The reason that we have to use the console to shut down the VM is that right now NCD’s GUI can't interact with the VM’s OS, which basically means the NCD is reduced to providing power to the VM or removing power to the VM. That's about the extent of what it can do with the VM at this point. In NCD I’m going to also power it off completely, right, I'm going to pull the plug and completely remove the connection from it. 

And once that process is completed we can then go into vCD or view this in vCloud. So we're going to go one layer down and look at the interface here to ensure that guest customization has been disabled for this VM.  This essentially tells VMware, “Hey, hands off – don't try to manage this VM at all because in this case you really can't, it's not possible there's no VMware tools installed.

So we start here, we select this VM and we say guest OS customization; so you can see here that enable guest customization is unchecked which is exactly what we want. This VM can’t be managed via VMware tools and so we don't even want it to try. Very good so we can close out of vCD.

Now that we've checked to ensure that the OS guest customization is not enabled we need to set up an IP for our VM because NCD and VMware tools can't set that information for us anymore. We're going to power this VM back on (and remember this is the only process that NCD would really be able to facilitate). 

OK, so I've made it back to my VM detail page and I'm going to boot this VM back up, turn it back on. When it's done booting I will open up the console in order to set my VM's IP manually.

OK, then once the console has opened I will log in and I’ll do a quick “ifconfig” just to see where I am. So you'll notice in this diagram that the ZombieVM is currently not connected to a network and I'd like to change that, obviously. So for this we are going to open up the network interfaces file. And I've already pre save this; all I have to do now is going here and delete the hash marks. But this is the general layout that you want to strive for. 

Now I'm just going to restart the Ethernet card. OK, and we’ll do an “ifconfig” just to make sure – and yep we have a successful change. I'm just going to shut this down.

Now the last step is to go into NCD and ensure that it is aware of the changes that we made, because without the VMware tools installed NCD has no way to communicate with the OS. We’ll scroll down to network interfaces and here at “edit network interface” I will tell it I want you to be on my VM network and I want you to take a static manual IP assignment: I want you to be at .155. Very good.

Here we go, I'm attached to my VM network at 155, and we have successfully reflected our changes to the guest OS into its IP configuration in NCD. 

That wraps up this video installment. Thanks for tuning in to this demonstration in NCD. As always we’d appreciate your feedback. If you found this video helpful or have ideas for videos in the future, we do source those from comments on our content so don't hesitate to share your thoughts with us. You can follow our YouTube channel for future videos and there are 24x7 detailed demonstrations with screenshots and step by step how-to’s at our knowledge base: https://navisite.uservoice.com/knowledgebase

Thanks for tuning in. I'm Hannah Warren, and I'll see you next time!