Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Prompt-free Appliance deployment : mounting disk in r/w mode

As I expained in the previous blog entry, the intend of the “Prompt-free Applicance deployment” series is to avoid to enter manually all the VM details on the very first start. Whether there’re a lot of steps, in the end it all can be scripted.
It can be done by only one way: modification of the scripts started on VM startup. To do so, we must have access to the scripts which are hosted on one of the 5 given disks. As shown in that other blog entry, the first one is the one we want to go through.
Unfortunately, whether VMWare offers the utility vmware-mount, it cannot be in read/write mode, the vmdk being compressed.

There’s no straightaway and easy method. The only way I found is to push the VM to ESXi, get back the file corresponding to the first disk, mount it, modify the script, and push back the file.

Here we’ll see how to get back and mount the file corresponding to the first disk.

A) First of all, we should “push” the appliance to ESXi.

I’m using the tool OVFTool as below.
Create a local .ovftool file, it will be taken by the command line:
echo "lax" > .ovftool
echo "datastore=vm" >> .ovftool
echo "skipManifestCheck" >> .ovftool
echo "overwrite" >> .ovftool
echo "powerOffTarget" >> .ovftool
echo "net:HostOnly=VM Network 2" >> .ovftool
#echo "powerOn" >> .ovftool
echo "name="myVM_name >> .ovftool

Note that it should not be configured to start the VM automatically.
Then, run the command line:
ovftool inputVM.ovf vi://root:pwd@192.168.1.10:443


B) Second, get the file from ESXi.

Here we have first to check what is the file.
From ESXi server, we have something like:
/vmfs/volumes/506c2d23-01dbe48d-7940-001ec9deb63b/HCMDB-SES-85302d # ls -l
-rw-------    1 root     root     7543455744 Jun  5 19:12 HCMDB-SES-85302d-flat.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root           472 Jun  5 19:11 HCMDB-SES-85302d.vmdk
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root             0 Jun  5 19:11 HCMDB-SES-85302d.vmsd
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1766 Jun  5 19:11 HCMDB-SES-85302d.vmx
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           271 Jun  5 19:11 HCMDB-SES-85302d.vmxf
-rw-------    1 root     root     5782896640 Jun  5 19:15 HCMDB-SES-85302d_1-flat.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root           479 Jun  5 19:12 HCMDB-SES-85302d_1.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root     36709597184 Jun  5 19:22 HCMDB-SES-85302d_2-flat.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root           479 Jun  5 19:15 HCMDB-SES-85302d_2.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root     13119782912 Jun  5 19:28 HCMDB-SES-85302d_3-flat.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root           479 Jun  5 19:22 HCMDB-SES-85302d_3.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root     18351128576 Jun  5 19:36 HCMDB-SES-85302d_4-flat.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root           479 Jun  5 19:28 HCMDB-SES-85302d_4.vmdk
/vmfs/volumes/506c2d23-01dbe48d-7940-001ec9deb63b/HCMDB-SES-85302d #

Disk one does not get any number, disk 2 is *_1, disk3 is *_2 and so on.

Within a simple command line, we can get it back to a local machine in a given directory:
vifs --server 192.168.1.10:443 --username root --password pwd --get '[vm] 'HCMDB-SES-85302d/HCMDB-SES-85302d-flat.vmdk' ./HCMDB-SES-85302d-esxi

Once done, on local machine:
[root@omsa:/nfs/software/PeopleSoftCD/OVA/HCMDB-SES-85302d/HCMDB-SES-85302d-esxi]# ls -l
total 7373864
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7543455744 Jun  5 21:49 HCMDB-SES-85302d-flat.vmdk
[root@omsa:/nfs/software/PeopleSoftCD/OVA/HCMDB-SES-85302d/HCMDB-SES-85302d-esxi]#


C) Now, mounting the file as a disk.

This is probably the trickiest past of that series. Well, unless you are a good Linux administrator.
We will use the Linux command losetup, from the man, here is a small explanation of what it is:
DESCRIPTION
       losetup  is  used  to associate loop devices with regular files or block devices, to detach loop devices and to query the status of a loop device.
Briefly speaking, mounting a flat file as a disk.

We should start by finding a free loop device:
[root@omsa:]# losetup --find
/dev/loop0
[root@omsa:]#

Then associating this loop device to the flat file:
[root@omsa:]# ls -l
total 7373864
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7543455744 Jun  5 21:49 HCMDB-SES-85302d-flat.vmdk
[root@omsa:]# losetup /dev/loop0 ./HCMDB-SES-85302d-flat.vmdk
[root@omsa:]#

We can now see the loop device as a result of a disk:
[root@omsa:]# fdisk -lu /dev/loop0

Disk /dev/loop0: 7543 MB, 7543455744 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 917 cylinders, total 14733312 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00064cf9

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/loop0p1   *          63      208844      104391   83  Linux
/dev/loop0p2          208845    10522574     5156865   83  Linux
/dev/loop0p3        10522575    14731604     2104515   82  Linux swap / Solaris
[root@omsa:]#

We recognize here the swap space as I describe a the previous post in the third partition, the first partition is the grub partition (see previous post for the content).
From the output above, we can say that the second partition is our.
The unit is 512 bytes, the starting point of the second partition is 208845. The starting offset of our partition will be 512*208845=106928640

We will be able to create a new loop device from the first within the computed offset:
[root@omsa:]# losetup --find
/dev/loop1
[root@omsa:]# losetup /dev/loop1 /dev/loop0 -o 106928640

Now we can really mount the disk itself from within the last loop device:
[root@omsa:]# mkdir /mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d
[root@omsa:]# mount /dev/loop1 /mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d -o rw,user

As of now, we will be able to go on the mount point and modify whatever we want. Any change will remains onto the disk.
For instance:
[root@omsa:]# cd /mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d]# ls
bin  boot  dev  etc  home  lib  lib64  lost+found  media  misc  mnt  opt  proc  root  sbin  selinux  srv  sys  tmp  u01  usr  var
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d]# cd tmp
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d/tmp]# touch test
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d/tmp]# rm -f test
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d/tmp]# cd ../
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d]# ls
bin  boot  dev  etc  home  lib  lib64  lost+found  media  misc  mnt  opt  proc  root  sbin  selinux  srv  sys  tmp  u01  usr  var
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d]# cd ./opt/oracle/psft/vm/
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d/opt/oracle/psft/vm]# ls
appbatch-start   expect-sftp     oraclevm-template-appbatch.sh  oraclevm-template-pia.sh     oraclevm-template-utils.sh  template-cleanup.sh
appliance.props  expect-ssh      oraclevm-template-db.sh        oraclevm-template-search.sh  ptem_variables.properties   tnsnames.ora
apply-hotfix.sh  installpia.sh   oraclevm-template-env.sh       oraclevm-template-ses.sh     README                      tnsnames.ora.exa
cmppropsfile.py  network-update  oraclevm-template-ext.sh       oraclevm-template.sh         sql                         updatepiahost.sh
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d/opt/oracle/psft/vm]# cp oraclevm-template.sh oraclevm-template.sh.orig
[root@omsa:/mnt/HCMDB-SES-85302d/opt/oracle/psft/vm]#

Ok, it will be serious time for script modification.
To be continued.

Nicolas.

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