Vsphere Replication Appliance without Network Protocol Profiles

VMware insists on having Network Protocol Profiles for Vsphere Replication appliances (at v5.8 anyway).

Now this is fine if you are using the Appliance in the traditional model of an appliance at each Site A vcenter and Site B vcenter and use SRM.

However not everyone will want to use this and today I had a scenario which a customer that needed to replicate VM's from Server A to server B and mirror that across multiple clusters each with their own network settings. The design was to put a replication appliance in each cluster. to manage that clusters replications.

The problem was each cluster had the same port group names. this had the undesired affect when going into the Network settings to setup the Network Protocol Profile you could only set up one profile per port group.  this isnt much use when I had 10 clusters all with the same port group name but different subnets, gateways and dns settings.  Yes I could change the port group name but there were live VM's and there is the issue of Management that the customer didnt want the names changed.

Initially I setup the Network Protocol Profile, deployed the appliance and then changed it for the next cluster appliance.  Until I found out the appliance would not re start as the profile settings were wrong after it was changed.  Simple solution was to disable the Vapp Options after each appliance was setup. As I was doing this I wondered can it be done via command line in the appliance?  Why? well  Vsphere webclient (5.5) is so slow reconfigure the Network Protocol Profiles and my usual answer is why not, I like a challenge and I couldnt find anything else about this documented?

I played about a bit and came up with a process of deploying the Appliance without the Vapp options at all and manually configure the appliance.

1. Deploy the appliance via OVF as normal.
2. Edit the VM settings and disable the Vapp options
3. Power on the VM and open a console
4. at the boot  menu screen press ‘e’ to get GNU grub menu.
5. Select the second option and press ‘e’ to edit (second option ends in root=/dev/sda2 append resume=->)
6. Add ‘init=/bin/bash’ to the end of the line and press enter
7. Select the ‘root (hd0’0)' option and press 'b' for boot
8. At the (none):/ prompt type passwd and enter a new password twice.
9. Reboot the appliance.
10. Once booted login as root and password you used above
11. Type ‘/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_conf_net’
12. Fill in the network details on the menu system starting with option 6 the ip, then 2 the gateway. The others it doesn’t matter what order.
13. Exit the network config and reboot.
14. If this is your first appliance access the appliance via the VAMI to configure the connection to vcenter, if you already have an appliance in place you can add the appliance into the Vcenter replication servers.

Ref:

VMware KB: Resetting a lost VMware vSphere Replication root password