ESET ERA OVA: NIC change "You Must Redeploy" *fixed*

[BDeep 7]

Mods: This is only my second time posting in the forums. Apologies if posting in the incorrect forum. Not sure where to post "FixIt" type threads in regards to the ERA OVA.

 

If your NIC changes on on your ERA VM during deployment.

 

The solution for VMware:

1. Before powering on your VM after the initial configuration, take a VM snapshot
2. Power on VM after snap is completed
3. Enter command line and type "nano /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistant-net.rules"
4. Scroll to the right on the first entry that conains an entry. You want the ATTR address MAC address on the first line. Ignore extra lines and entries. This is the original MAC address that deployed with the VM. Write that MAC address down somewhere.
   
   
   
   

   # PCI device 0x8086:0x100f (e1000)
   SUBSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:11:22:aa:bb:cc" [more text]

5. Power off the VM.
6. Revert to snapshot.
7. Edit VM settings
8. Select "Network Adapter", change the MAC Address column to "Manual" and specify the original MAC address
   
   

    

9. Power on your VM and wait for configuration.
   
   

    

The problem:

I stage a lot of ERA servers in our main data center before moving them to our remote data centers. The nature of our setup requires that our vSphere environments are not joined (therefore vMotion is unavailable). To further complicate matters, DHCP is not available at these sites and bandwidth links are very slow (remote data centers).

A typical ERA OVA Proxy setup for me goes like this:

1. Deploy OVA at main site
2. Obtain DHCP IP address
3. Configue "Proxy" via web console (too many problems modifying ovf.xml) including static IP of this VM once it hits the new site
4. Save settings (which cause the VM to reboot)
5. In the VM console window, repeatedly hit "ESC" key at boot to bring up GRUB boot menu (what I am doing is preventing automatic boot)
6. Once I am "stopped" at the GRUB boot menu I power off the VM: Effectively, this presrves the initial configuration that I did in the web GUI without appying the settings.
7. I use VMware P2V converstion tool to "download" the image to my local machine and "upload" the image to the remote site
8. I power on at remote site and let the configuration finish

The issue is at step 7. Somewhere along the lines, I believe with the P2V tool, the NIC changes and causes the MAC address to change. Not something that occurs with vMotion but does occur when the VM is moved with P2V tool. This creates a problem for the OVA when it configures the server because it is looking fror "NIC 0" with MAC address aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff and what it gets is "NIC 1" with MAC address aa:bb:cc:xx:yy:zz. An exception gets thrown and the OVA answer to the end-user (you/me) is "You must redeploy".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 6, 2015 by BDeep