A lot of the scripted installation tools that VMware offers allows the usage of a central HTTP based repository for hosting the files. Today I stumbled over a little gem that might just help you create a “quick and dirty” HTTP based deployment scenario by running a simple command in your terminal. By default, this command works on any system that has Python installed on it, so OS X and Linux should be ready to go as is. As for you Windows users out there, well, your mileage will vary.
The trick here is a one line Python command that simply creates a HTTP server listing the files in your current directory over a given port. On my MacBook, I opened Terminal and ran the following command:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ..If I then open my browser, and point it to the IP address of my MacBook, I get a directory listing showing the contents of the current directory.
As you can see, the directory contains a few files, namely a Damn Small Linux appliance packaged as an OVA, as well as the Linux installation files for ovftool.
In this particular case, I wanted to install ovftool inside a running vMA instance I had in my infrastructure. So, by running the following commands I got ovftool downloaded via HTTP, from my MacBook, inside a running vMA instance by only downloading the files in to a given directory and serving it via HTTP from there to vMA.
By running the following command (output edited for verbosity)
vi-admin@record:> wget http://192.168.5.62:8000/VMware-ovftool-3.0.1-801290-lin.x86_64.bundle && sudo sh VMware-ovftool-3.0.1-801290-lin.x86_64.bundle
100%[======================================>] 36,631,447 1.46M/s in 23s
2013-05-14 12:13:06 (1.52 MB/s) - `VMware-ovftool-3.0.1-801290-lin.x86_64.bundle.saved [36631447/36631447]
...
vi-admin's password:
Extracting VMware Installer...done.
...
Do you agree? [yes/no]: yes
...
Installing VMware OVF Tool component for Linux 3.0.1
Configuring...
[######################################################################] 100%
Installation was successful.
vi-admin@record:/tmp>I was able to download and install ovftool, in one command.
The same deployment method could also easily be used to install host patches, deploy OVF based appliances and even install VIB files from a central repository. In fact, thats the next thing to do here, deploy the Damn Small Linux appliance, by using the newly installed ovftool package. The flexibility of having a small HTTP server available by running a single command is great, and Im sure there are many other use cases that I have yet to consider.
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