This week I found sometime to play around with the Ultimate Deployment Appliance created by Carl Thijssen. With the demise of “RTFM Education” I rather neglected this project and didn’t find a suitable landing zone for it until I was able to start mikelaverick.com. This week I’ve done a couple of very minor updates. Firstly, there are new “subtemplate” and “template” files which more closely reflect the command-line tools that are now available in ESX 5.1. To tell you the truth I don’t use the UDA myself half as much as used to. That’s because in my lab environment I’ve switched to using PowerCLI to issue a “Factory Reset” and then use PowerCLI to reconfigure my hosts. The days of me refreshing my lab environment by using the UDA aren’t as common. I’m not aided by the fact that some of my Levono TS200 don’t have the special “blue widget” that enabled a remote console to the physical box (they are £200 each – OUCH!) . Looking back over the new “templates” I the next version I might switch over using to ESXCLI for as much as possible. There’s still some ye olde “esxcfg-” commands in the templates. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I just think it might be “neater” to use one command, rather than array of them.
Along side the new templates, I’ve buffed up the “admin guide” for the UDA too. Nothing spectacular to report but there were a lot of vSphere4.1 references that needed to be cleaned out, logos updated and so on. Remember this admin guide is by no means comprehensive – its more of a “quick start” guide…
Finally, now that I’m with VMware I am able to test the UDA against our latest builds – so I’m pleased to see that the UDA works flawlessly with ESX.next. So with a bit of luck I won’t have to hassle Carl to do an update just yet.
If you want to download the UDA – and new bits toddle over here