I have created a new post here that details the most up to date information for CentOS 7.x Templates.

 

I have documented how to create a CentOS 7 VMware Gold Template for all the non-Linux admins out there.

Following the instructions below will yield a template ready for future installs that ensures you can deploy at speed.

All told this should take no longer than 15 minutes to complete.

I have amended the post with details on how to fix the guest customisation issues that I was experiencing before.

I can now successfully deploy new VM’s from the template.

Creating the VM

As a fan of the C# client I have used that for the process of creating the CentOS 7 Template, obviously if you want to do this via the web client you’re more than welcome to do so.

Use Ctrl + N to open the New Virtual Machine wizard.

Accept the Typical configuration and click Next

Enter the name of the template and click Next

Select your Resource Pool and click Next

Select your Datastore and click Next

Choose your OS type and version, click Next

Choose your Network and change your adapter type if required, the VMXNET3 driver is present during the installation process and is the default card, click Next

Choose your disk provisioning policy and click Next

Click the Edit VM settings box

Browse to your ISO file, click Connect at power on and then remove the floppy drive, click Finish

Installing CentOS 7

Now we have the VM created we need to install the OS, select the VM, open the console and hit the green arrow to power on

Click in to the VM and use the up cursor to skip the Media Test and select Install CentOS 7

Choose your default language and locale, click Continue

Select Software Selection

I chose Infrastructure Server as this looks to be the replacement for the older Basic Server install that a lot of people defaulted to. Click Done

Select Installation Destination

Click Done

Click Network & Hostname

Toggle the On\Off switch so that you’re connected. All being good when you chose your network (and you have DHCP active on your network) you should get an address, if you don’t click on the Configure button and enter the IP addressing details there. I have left the hostname as the default setting as this will be changed during deployment. Click Done

Click Begin Installation

Select Root Password

Enter your default password twice, click Done

Wait for the installation to finish

Click Reboot

Installing CentOS 7 Software Updates and Open-VM-Tools

Using either Putty or the console log in to the server

Here I am still using the VM Console to access the VM

Login as root

Now we are going to install updates using yum.

Type yum update –skip-broken

skip-broken is a feature in yum to skip packages that have dependency problems or introduce problems to the installed packages

Type y when prompted to download the updates.

Type y

Update complete, now on to installing open-vm-tools

Type y

Final Steps

As this VM is being built to create a template from we need to add an additional VMware tools plug-in.

First we need to import the VMware Keys.

Using the curl command to download the two files to a directory

 

curl –o filename.ext http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-DSA-KEY.pub

curl –o filename.ext http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub

You then need to import the keys, you need to repeat the command twice.

rpm --import /key_path/key_name

Once that’s done we need to use nano to create the following file

/etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repo

The file needs to contain the following information

[vmware-tools]
name = VMware Tools
baseurl = http://packages.vmware.com/packages/rhel7/x86_64/
enabled = 1
gpgcheck = 1

Type Ctrl x to save and exit.

Now we need to install the additional plug-in.

Type yum install open-vm-tools-deploypkg

Type y

Installation completed. Time to restart the service

systemctl restart vmtoolsd

After the service restart we can see that VMware Tools is now reporting in.

Finally before we power off to convert it to a template we need to make some final changes, this change forces vCenter to think that this is a RHEL 7 VM rather than CentOS 7 which allows the VM to run the guest customisation during deployment.

Currently if you run cat /etc/redhat-release you will get the following response

What we want to see is

This forces guest customisation to be run thinking the OS is RHEL7 and thereby allowing guest customisation during deployment.

To make the change run the following command

rm -f /etc/redhat-release && touch /etc/redhat-release && echo ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.0 (Maipo)’ > /etc/redhat-release

The above command was found via the http://serverfault.com/questions/653052/from-vsphere-5-5-deploying-centos-7-from-template-ignores-customizations website so thanks guys.

We are now ready to power down the VM.

Type shutdown –P now this will shutdown and power off the VM.

Finally we are going to convert it to a template.

In the C# client browse to the VM Summary page and click on Convert to Template