If you’ve been following the Vinternals blog too, this will be no news to you, but the guys behind it have been busy building a virtual appliance, and they are now releasing version 1.0.0 of the app called Statelesx (placeholder page for now).
From the blog post:
“The architecture of the app is something like this:
1) A python script on your fat ESX boxes that runs on startup
2) A Java app that listens for requests and acts via the VirtualCenter SDK
3) A minimal web interface for managing XML cluster configuration filesIn a nutshell, you create a cluster configuration file that contains cluster options (DRS,DPM,HA) and network info (vSwitches, portgroups, vmkernel interfaces) and then associate hosts to the cluster config file by their FQDN and UUID. The python script on the ESX host sends the UUID to the statelesx listener, which searches the cluster config files for a match on the UUID. If it finds one, it goes to work. If it doesn’t, nothing happens.”
It runs on Ubuntu 8.04 JeOS with the Sun Java 6 package and Tomcat 6. VI 3.5 is required, although if they get enough requests they may also backport to VI 3.0.
The team has created a couple of demo videos to show off the app: the first one giving an overview and basic configuration demo, and the second one going into much more detail around the XML config files and demoing an advanced configuration being applied to some hosts.
Unfortunately, the app isn’t available for download yet, as they haven’t yet found a hosting provider who can host the 200 MB zip file for free as well provide the necessary bandwidth. If you can help them out, get in touch! (vinternals at gmail dot com)