VirtualCenter 2.5 Silent Install

As with VC 2.0, the unattended install documentation for 2.5 is rather scant. Like most people in large enterprises, I have the requirement to silently install VC, pointing it at a non-local license server and database, and without update manager (separation is for 2 reasons: (1) VUM could be updated out of line with VirtualCenter and (2) I haven't decided what VUM architecture to go with yet :-D).

This can be achieved with the following:

start /wait VMware-vcserver.exe /s /w /v"/qr WARNING_LEVEL=0
LICENSING=custom VPX_LICENSEPATH=27000@hostname.domain VC_EDITION=vc DB_SERVER_TYPE=Custom DB_DSN=\"VC DSN\" INSTALL_VCI=\"\" REBOOT=SUPPRESS"

Of course, if you run that on a command line, you don't need to escape the quotes with a backslash. Also there are some other things that must be setup first... creating the database and DSN in advance etc, I'm putting together a little video to demo that so stay tuned!