Porting Builds to Studio2

A few tips when migrating builds from VMware Studio v1 to Studio v2:

- studiocli has a built-in feature to convert build profiles from v1 to v2 but I've been unable to make that work and don't feel like fixing the python behind it

# studiocli -C -p studio1vm.xml
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/opt/vmware/share/build/profconv", line 658, in 
   main()
 File "/opt/vmware/share/build/profconv", line 639, in main
   osspecific(xp)
 File "/opt/vmware/share/build/profconv", line 406, in osspecific
   newurl.setContent(VMTOOLS)
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'VMTOOLS' referenced before assignment

So I used the Studio 2 GUI to rough out some new build profiles then with two vim sessions side-by-side I migrated the settings, users, scripts etc manually. That sucks pretty hard when you've got a handful of appliances to port.


- The embedded shell scripts used to require escaping on variable references, like:

FOO=/tmp/foo
echo 1 > \$FOO

..but in studio 2.0 the escaping is no longer necessary, like this:

FOO=/tmp/foo
echo 1 > $FOO

- studiocli can no longer be run with remote SSH due to some environment issue. Instead just run vabs.pl directly, as in:

ssh root@vmstudio2 /opt/vmware/share/build/vabs.pl \
                -cvp /tmp/profile.xml -i instanceX

It sure is nice building OVA and OVF 1.0 targets now. Retiring VMware Server 1 is a joy too as both the Studio2 VM and builds happen within one ESX system. Build times are improved by about 15% despite the additional targets.

I'm working on vApp creation to bundle up a handful of appliances in my nightly builds and can post about that if people are curious.