DoubleCloud => Private Cloud + Public Cloud

After 1.5 release last week, I have made a few more big enhancements as detailed below:  Read more...

Since the first release of VMDeployer, we’ve seen so many downloads that we decided to invest more time even though it’s a free tool. The community support can be bigger motivation than anything else.

Here we have this 1.5 release which adds a few more features. Most of these features are there for users to have complete end-to-end user experiences. I will explain why under each item.  Read more...

When version 1.2 was released, I had almost finished the work on 1.3. Then, I got a few interesting ideas and quickly implemented them altogether. Instead of releasing 1.3, I’d pull things together for 1.4 release.

Here are a few highlights in this version 1.4:  Read more...

With the release of version 1.0 of our free GUI tool to deploy virtual machines on all platforms, we’ve successfully solved the issue of deploying our search appliance using the vSphere Web Client. We have a few more happy new customers ever since.

However, it could not deploy the NSX manager because 1.0 does not support OVF properties. To be exact, the deployment goes through, but the deployed NSX Manager VM cannot power on due to the required OVF value is not set for the admin password.  Read more...

Recently we got quite a few complaints about installing vSearch appliance OVA onto vSphere 6.5 using the vSphere Web Client. It does not work. As a quick workaround, we told customers to try the VMware ovftool command line. While it works mostly, we still got questions and issues on the usage. For one thing, it’s not always straight-forward and easy to get the parameters right.  Read more...

If you want to export a virtual appliance for internal deployment, it’s quite easy. The vSphere Web Client or ovftool command line can take care of this easily. But it’s a different story to build a virtual appliance based software product, which should not only make it work, but also include product information.

Here are some information I learned and decisions I made from packaging an OVF product recently. Hope it would be useful for you. You can also check another post on how to compact the virtual disk for smallest OVA or VMDK.  Read more...