Deploying vCenter 8.0U3i using simple automation.

Did you know the vCenter ISO contains everything you need to complete a fully automated installation of the vCenter VCSA appliance? This is great for homelabbing or even for production deployment. I performed this test using the latest build of vCenter at the time of writing (8.0U3i) but the principal should work with older and newer builds. Lets have a look at the steps required.

Assumptions.

This guide assumes you already have an ESXi host up and running to deploy the VCSA appliance to. It also assumes you have the VCSA ISO downloaded. Note for a clean install, the downloaded file needs to be the full ISO installer, not the depot patch file which is used for upgrades. The guide also assumes you are running this from a Windows machine and that you have already added DNS records (as appropriate). Adjust as necessary for your environment. Once your host is ready and the vCenter ISO is downloaded, continue on.

Preparing the installation

1. Locate your vCenter ISO, right click and mount it. A new drive letter should appear allowing you to browse the contents.

2. Navigate to E:\vcsa-cli-installer\templates\install (where E:\ is your CD drive - change as applicable).

3. Download a copy of the file embedded_vCSA_on_ESXi.json and save it to C:\temp (I renamed my file to VCSA_install.json as you'll see below). Right click and open with your favorite text editor (eg NotePad ++ etc)

4. In this file you can see a default template containing various elements you will need to configure to perform the automated installation of your VCSA appliance. See below for an example of how I have updated my JSON template with the values i will use for the deployment. Note that i've opted for a deployment size of "Small" (4 x vCPUs/21GB RAM) as opposed to "Tiny" (2 vCPUs/14GB RAM) as I found the "tiny" option had virtually no overhead, at least not without fiddling with some of the services. For reference you can review the vCenter T-shirt sizes here on the Broadcom official documentation. You can obviously configure your template settings as desired, and as appropriate to your environment.

   

5. Open a command prompt > Change the drive letter to your CD drive (in my case E:\) > then change directory to vcsa-cli-installer\win32. In this directory is the VCSA deploy tool which we will now use, together with the JSON template we created earlier, to perform an unattended install of vCenter

6. Now type the command vcsa-deploy.exe install --acknowledge-ceip --accept-eula --no-esx-ssl-verify "C:\Temp\VCSA_install.json" -v. See the screenshot below for this step

   

7. Press enter when ready > the automated installation will now begin. The installation will proceed in 2 parts. Firstly the initial deployment > then the script will power on the VM, then the script will perform the second stage to configure the VM

8. Here's a screenshot of the automation now in progress

   

9. If you switch to your ESXi Host UI, you will see the VCSA VM has now appeared

10. In the cmd console window, if the deployment is progressing successfully you should see a progress meter (highlighted below) which you can monitor to completion

    

11. Once the deployment stage completes, it will power on your VCSA VM and move on to the configuration stage

12. Below you can see the script is now configuring the appliance

    

    
    
    
    

    13. Once the script completes, you should be able to log into the vCenter via the Web UI

    
    

There you go guys, that's how to perform an unattended installation of vCenter using the build in vcsa-deploy tool.