Terraform 0.9.0 was released

 

It has been two weeks since Terraform 0.9.0-beta2 was released, and now we can enjoy a new stable version! It’s a pleasure to say that 3 hours ago Hashicorp has released Terraform 0.9.0. In the current version you can find changes I mentioned in the previous post and of course much more! I think that the most important things in the newest release are Remote Backends and State Locking. Remote Backend replaces remote state and it changes architecture of tracking the state of your infrastructure. You can find more information in the #11286 Pull Request and in official Terraform documentation. There is a Continue reading

Fun with PowerCLI – how to get Windows VMs in vCloud Director

 

Honestly speaking, I’m in love with PowerCLI. I know that VMware admin cannot optimize his job without PowerCLI, but in my case it’s a higher level of scripting love. At first, I want to stress that my scripting experience started with Linux systems and its scripting languages. I have been in awe of how excellent PowerShell can be since I decided to simplify my work with Windows Servers. Of course VMware administration has enforced me to become friends with PowerShell. New cmdlets, new possibilities, and – last but not least – the best way for managing and configuring VMware vSphere Continue reading

Terraform 0.9.0-beta2 was released

 

Terraform 0.9.0-beta2 was released on 2nd March 2017. It contains some bug fixes (including 0.9.0-beta1 fixes), two features and six improvements. At the same time Hashicorp has released version 0.8.8, which contains, among other, a new provider – Spotinst. Also 0.8.8 version of Terraform introduces a new interpolation – slice. Slice allows you to get “the portion of list between from (inclusive) and to (exclusive)”. Syntax of this interpolation is simple – slice(list, from, to). Moreover there are some new Resources and Data Users and lot of bug fixes. Below you can see the full Release Notes for both versions. If you need more information Continue reading

Deploying vSphere VM with Terraform

 

Do you know when infrastructure deploying was revolutionized? It was the day when the world saw the Terraform for the first time. Yes, Infrastructure as a Code is a great idea which can simplify our infrastructure provisioning. We can see the full power of the Terraform just with an AWS, but it can be also used with another Cloud Providers. In the Terraform documentation you can find Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, but also private and on-premise providers like Openstack or VMware vSphere. I work with VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director, so Terraform is designed for me too! Continue reading

Terraform spec.identity.hostName error with vSphere provider

 

Today I’ve got a short post. It is especially dedicated to the new Terraform users, who use this tool for automation vSphere virtual machines. It is simply a matter of time till you face this problem. I mean, Terraform spec.identity.hostName error when you try to deploy your vSphere infrastructure. Why? Let me explain. What is the problem? At first I’ll show you the problem. After applying Terraform build, virtual machine is cloning and when a customization operation should start, you see something like this: When does Terraform spec.identity.hostName error appear? I met this problem once and it was caused by my habit and Continue reading

Ansible template Role – easy way of creating projects

 

Working with Ansible is a real pleasure. You can build your own roles and big projects with many combinations and configurations. But sometimes you only want to quickly deploy a whole project with specified roles. When your automation needs to run many roles in different configurations, you face the problem of flexibility and fast deployment. Admittedly, Ansible community created tons of solutions, but maybe this one would be helpful for some of you. Especially with fast or temporary provisioning projects on the nodes without fully configured Ansible environment. Ansible template Role is my fork of the Mohamed Boufnichel’s ansible_project_template Role. I Continue reading

Jenkins Windows slave agent as a service

 

Jenkins is a fantastic tool for automation every process in your company/lab/your own projects. You can integrate your PowerCLI scripts with Ansible and even more utilities. I won’t describe Jenkins, because the are tons of pages (and also its own Wikipedia) which do it better than me. I want to focus on one problem. Run Jenkins Windows slave agent as a service inside the operating system. Jenkins allows you to set up many workers. It can be a Linux as well as Windows machine. In the basic configuration, Jenkins has only one master node, on which is installed. For more Continue reading

ESXi upgrade permission denied

 

There are many bad things which can happen during the infrastructure upgrade. Sometimes it is caused by a sysadmin mistake, sometimes it may be a software bug, but it really does not matter what the main reason is. You must fix it. Nowadays we have much easier job than – for instance – twenty years ago. Now we have Google, lots of blogs and other pages with millions of information. However, we should follow the way created on our own. Take a look on this scenario: