Boxgrinder ESX Delivery Plugin

Deliver appliances to VMWare ESX hypervisors

Pre-requisites

Boxgrinder
VMWare ESX/ESXi hypervisor with SSH service enabled

Install

$ gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc boxgrinder-esx-delivery-plugin

Usage

$ boxgrinder-build -l esx-delivery-plugin \
                   -p vmware --platform-config type:personal,thin_disk:true \
                   -d esx --delivery-config esx_host:esx-test-host,esx_user:root,esx_password:secret \
                   my-appliance.appl

Boxgrinder will build the appliance, convert the appliance disk image to a suitable VMDK variant and the resulting VMDK will be uploaded to the ESX host via SSH and used to creat a virtual machine in that ESX host.

#ESX delivery plugin configuration parameters

The ESX Boxgrinder delivery plugin accepts the following list of config parameters:

esx_host: the ESX hostname/ipaddress. Default is 127.0.0.1.

esx_user: the ESX user to use. Default is root.

esx_password: the ESX password to use. Default is secret.

datastore: the ESX datastore to use. Default is datastore1.

name: the target virtual machine name. Default is Virtual Appliance name.

memory: the amount of RAM the appliance will have. Default is 512 MB.

cpu: the number of CPUs the appliance will have. Default 1.

All the config parameters have default values. Use the --delivery-config Boxgrinder parameter to configure the appliance upload to fit your needs.

Make sure you define at lease esx_host, esx_user and esx_password parametes to fit your needs.