17 September, 2009

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.

08 September, 2009

VMware Studio 2.0 shipped!

Last Monday the production release of VMware Studio 2.0 made its way to the download servers.

It was great seeing some of the VMware Studio team on the VMworld show floor. There's a lot to be proud of with last week's production release of Studio 2.0.

Upgrade from the Studio 2.0 Beta release immediately. I advise Studio 1.0 users run Studio 2.0 side-by-side with Studio 1.0 to ease migration.

Studio 2.0 Beta got some security love from Security Focus. Good times

Winner VMworld09 Best of Show and Gold Security!

Congrats to my fantastic team of engineers and architects at HyTrust for sweeping the awards at this year's VMworld in San Francisco.

http://hytrust.com/