Deploying multiple vSphere VMs with Terraform

 

Automation doesn’t mean only the ability to automate some process and repeating it over and over again. It means also the ability to automate every automated process – if it’s possible of course. So even if we can automatically deploy VM, why shouldn’t we try to deploy multiple machines? Everything is fine until we need to deploy three, four or more same virtual servers. It would be very annoying unless we automate also this process – process of deploying multiple vSphere VMs with Terraform. If you haven’t read my previous article, you can do it here: Deploying vSphere VM with Terraform. Continue reading

Terraform vSphere provider is alive again – hostname variable

 

Yes, I have been waiting for it for a long time! When Hashicorp decided to separate Terraform Core from Providers, vSphere Provider died. It lasted two months – no merging, no new releases. But it has changed at the end of the August – Chris Marchesi (better known as vancluever) took the matter into his own hands and he’s now taking care of re the repository. It’s great news, especially for those of us who use Terraform in the daily work with the vSphere. Terraform vSphere provider allows to use different hostname and name Chris has made a lot of work since Continue reading

vCloud HCL generator – small update

 

I should have updated my vCloud HCL generator for Terraform immediately after releasing the 0.10 version of Terraform. Unfortunately, it has been done at 2nd August 2017, so I didn’t have enough time. And I should have made it after the separating providers from the Terraform Core because the possibility of using original and translated port exists in the vCloud Director Provider code since 16th June 2017! But today I found some time and I’ve updated my code, so now it’s compatible with Terraform again. It’s a very small change because I’ve added only the one additional line with one Continue reading

Summer break and the future plans

 

August is a great month. Everyone can find the way to relax, but it means less time for working and writing. I should now publish a new post, but I am enjoying my break. I try to keep the two weeks between each article – it’s obvious to me that systemic is one of the most important things in blogging. Unfortunately, summer doesn’t help in regularly writing. I have begun some posts, but I can’t complete anyone of them. On the other hand, I don’t want to decrease the quality. On the contrary, I would like to publish articles which will Continue reading

How to use credentials in Jenkins projects?

 

Some time ago I published a post in which I explain how you can create credentials in Jenkins. It’s very important topic because there are several ways to manage the credentials, but not all of them are safe. I showed you in my post how to use Credential Plugin, and it’s enough for adding, storing and managing secrets, but not for using them in the builds. I think this topic should have a separate discussion, so I decided to make this post. So now you will learn how to use credentials in Jenkins projects! Short reminder One can add and manage Continue reading

vCloud HCL generator for Terraform

 

vCloud Director is one of the VMware products which help service providers with the public cloud delivery. As with the most VMware products, developers can communicate with it by API. So if something has API, it may have its own Terraform Provider! To be honest, I use vSphere Provider more than vCloud, but sometimes it’s better to use Terraform instead of using GUI or even PowerCLI. Of course, I don’t save the states of my infrastructure, because I don’t need to destroy or change it later, but I can save my time during the creation of new infrastructure. One of Continue reading

“Unable to expire password for root” – Debian 9 in vCloud Director

 

Debian 9 was released on 17th of June 2017, and for me, it was not only the information about the arriving upgrades. Also, it was the sign of the new vCloud Director template. I started making it on Monday, and I faced the problem with customization. Of course, I used Open-VM-Tools because I try to use them everywhere. I had many problems with customization, but it was the first time when I had a problem with password customization on a Linux guest OS – I got “unable to expire password for root” error. Fortunately, I took one look at the Continue reading

Separating Providers from the Terraform core

 

Terraform is my favorite tool for infrastructure building and managing. Although I use it mostly for the vSphere and vCloud Director environments (you can see more here), I know that I am far from making full use of it. Hashicorp project is growing so fast, there are some problems with scalability. Moreover, as Hashicorp wrote on their blog, Providers maintaining is quite hard because of their number. Hence decision about separating Providers from the Terraform core. This change will be applied in the 0.10.0-beta1 version of Terraform. This move will help developers not associated with the Hashicorp. No more conflicts with Continue reading

Cannot customize CentOS on vCloud Director

 

Last week I spent some time creating and updating vCloud Director templates. It’s a very long process if you want to do everything perfectly. You know, one mistake and you have to deploy the vApp, change the configuration, update metadata and add vApp to catalog one more time. During this process, I faced the problem with CentOS 7.3. It was a fresh installation from official DVD iso. Everything worked fine except one thing – customization. Of course, I chose the open-vm-tools package and made sure that daemon is running, but customization didn’t want to work properly. Finally, I found the Continue reading

How to create credentials in Jenkins

 

Every system, application or another solution has some authentication providers. Sometimes it’s a local password storage, sometimes administrator can implement AD (or another LDAP), Radius, OAuth etc. Nobody can reach the system without username and password, private key, secret token etc. Words below are so obvious that I feel stupid for writing them. But anyway it’s a very important entry into my today post – how to create credentials in Jenkins. Because even Jenkins has to use credentials in its projects and builds. If you have ever used Jenkins, you probably know that you can pass username and password as a Continue reading