Cobbler, ESXi, CentOS, and VMWare Tools

Posted by Joe Topjian on March 24, 2011 under Administration | Read the First Comment

Introduction

This short article will detail a Cobbler snippet for automatically installing the ESXi VMWare Tools.

Table of Contents

• Method
  • VMWare Repo
  • Cobbler Snippet
  • Snippet Inclusion
• Conclusion

Method

This method was inspired by this blog post. It imports the VMWare RPM key and then creates a Yum repository to download the VMWare RPMs. I simply took these instructions and modified them to be able to done automatically via Cobbler.

VMWare Repo

Create a file called vmware.repo with the following contents:

[vmware-tools]
name=VMware Tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever – $basearch
baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/4.1/rhel5/i686
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Note the 4.1 and i686. Replace these with your version of ESXi and the RedHat/CentOS architecture you are using.

Next, place this file on a web server that your VMs can access during installation. For this article, the address will be http://192.168.255.1/vmware.repo.

Cobbler Snippet

The next step is to create a Cobbler snippet in /var/lib/cobbler/snippets. I called mine vmware_tools, but feel free to name it whatever you’d like.

The snippet looks like this:

wget http://192.168.255.1/vmware.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware.repo
rpm --import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-KEY.pub
yum -y install vmware-tools

The snippet is easy enough to understand — it can be thought of as just a short shell script.

It first downloads the repo made in the last step, imports the VMWare RPM GPG key, and then installs the vmware-tools.

Snippet Inclusion

Edit your kickstart template in /var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts and add a call for this snippet in the %post section:

$SNIPPET('vmware_tools')

Finally, sync cobbler and everything is ready to go.

Conclusion

This short article detailed how to set up Cobbler to automatically install the VMWare tools to Cobbler-built virtual machines during the installation process.