Duncansapien’s Techblog

Overview

Previous articles have described the installation of

• an evaluation version of VMware Infrastucture 3.5
• … managed by Virtual Centre 2.5 software (on a physical machine)
• … and connected to the OpenFiler SAN by means of NFS.

We now require to setup a Virtual Machine (VM).

Getting the ISOs to OpenFiler

Here, we have two ISO images of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Std edition from which we wish to install VMs. Now in VMware Workstation, one can specify that the CD drive of a VM to be installed is linked to an ISO image which resides on a drive accessible to VMware Workstation. In VMware Infrastucture (VI3), however, things are a little different.

In VI3, one uses Virtual Infrastucture Client to install VMs. The Client connects to an instance of Virtual Centre Server 2.5, which only knows about two kinds of storage for storing anything:

1. Storage local to each ESX Server
2. SAN-based storage

So, if one has an ISO image, one needs to get this to one of the above storage areas.

FileZilla and OpenFiler

Here we used the freeware FileZilla software to transfer the ISOs to our OpenFiler SAN. First of all, we need to permit FTP on the OpenFiler share. The steps are

1. On the OpenFiler web interface, click on SHARES and locate the NFS share which is visible to the ESX servers (esx-nfs-share) and enable the FTP service.
   
2. Click on the share (esx-nfs-share) and the properties window will open.
3. Under Host Access Configuration, locate the FTP column and click in RW (Read-Write).

Next, we upload our ISO images.

1. Download FileZilla, the free FTP client.
2. In FileZilla, one creates Sites which just store remote hosts easily. Here a site named OpenFiler was created with the IP number of our OpenFiler SAN, and login credentials of openfiler and the associated password.
3. Once connected. we can see the OpenFiler root file system has underneath a folder structure of /esx/esxvol1/homes
   
4. It is unclear where the homes folder came from, but feeling our way, we create a folder /esx/esxvol1/iso and copy the locally stored (on your PC) ISO images here.
5. Lastly, one might like to set 755 permissions on the ISOs - owner has rwx, group and other have just rx. In FileZilla, one just right-clicks the ISO file and chooses properties. A popup window permits setting of the UNIX permissions. Yes, at this stage, we’re not exactly sure if this needs to be done, but we do it anyway.
   

One might expect that’s it - but alas Virtual Centre does not see these ISO images, so we have to do some work with file and folder ownership.

OpenFiler - changing ownership of the ISO images

Ok, so the ISO’s are on the SAN but Virtual Center cannot locate them when one browses for them, when setting up a new Virtual Machine. Let’s take a look at the OpenFiler filestore:

1. On the physical OpenFiler PC, login as root at the console.
2. Issue the >mount command to see what’s mounted (naturally :o)
   We find /mnt/esx/vol1 is mounted via NFS.
3. Let’s see what’s in this folder:
   > cd /mnt/esx/vol1
   > ls -lF

   -rw- — — root root aquota.group
   -rw- — — root root aquota.user
   drwxrwxrwx ofguest ofguest esx-nfs-share/
   -rw-r–r– esx-nfs-share.info.xml
   drwxrwxrwx root root homes/

4. Now Virtual Centre can see the esx-nfs-share/ folder, so we simply create a folder named ISO within this share and change ownership and group membership to that of ofguest.
   From folder /mnt/esx/vol1 we move the iso files:
   > mkdir esx-nfs-share/iso
   > mv esx-nfs-share/homes/iso/*.iso esx-nfs-share/iso
5. And finally change owership of files and folders if required:
   > chown ofguest esx-nfs-share/iso/ -R
   > chgrp ofguest *.iso
6. Now, the iso folder and all files within it should have owner and group ofguest (else change them until they do). A final screencap here shows how FileZilla sees things.
   

The ofguest Account

It would appear that ofguest ownership arises because in OpenFiler, the above share was created with public guest access in the Share Access Control Mode section. As the OpenFiler NAS and ESX servers are on a closed LAN, on the 192.168.19.0 network, we can safely leave this for now but on non-private network, naturally this would not be secure.