Pallet and VMWare

[Jon Woods]

We're about to want to extend our Pallet + VMFest (VirtualBox) work to embrace a corporate VMWare infrastructure.  There are tantalising glimpses on the web of Pallet and VMWare working together, but nothing concrete.

Are they any open source pallet-vmware bridges analogous to pallet-vmfest, or failing that open source Clojure wrappers around the VMWare Java SDK?  Or do I have to be the nth person to write such a thing :) ?

[Jonathan Woods]

On reflection, this is possibly a dumb question.  Maybe the natural thing to do would be to interpose an existing jclouds provider between Pallet and VMWare.  I'd welcome any thoughts on this, though, since it's not yet an area I've explored.

On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 8:47 AM, Jon Woods <jonof...@gmail.com> wrote:

We're about to want to extend our Pallet + VMFest (VirtualBox) work to embrace a corporate VMWare infrastructure.  There are tantalising glimpses on the web of Pallet and VMWare working together, but nothing concrete.

Are they any open source pallet-vmware bridges analogous to pallet-vmfest, or failing that open source Clojure wrappers around the VMWare Java SDK?  Or do I have to be the nth person to write such a thing :) ?

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[Adrian Cole]

Not sure what is state of the art on this one, but I'm bcc nagging Andrea in case he knows :)

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[Antoni Batchelli]

There was a project for using vmfest agaist VMWare vDirector (I believe), and they got it working, but I don’t think it was ever released as open source…

What is your infrastructure?

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Antoni Batchelli,
- twitter: @tbatchelli , @disclojure
--- email: tbatc...@gmail.com
----- web: tbatchelli.org , disclojure.org

----- gpg: public key

[Antoni Batchelli]

—

Antoni Batchelli,
- twitter: @tbatchelli , @disclojure
--- email: tbatc...@gmail.com
----- web: tbatchelli.org , disclojure.org

----- gpg: public key

From: Antoni Batchelli tbatc...@gmail.com
Reply: Antoni Batchelli tbatc...@gmail.com
Date: May 29, 2014 at 9:37:55 AM
To: palle...@googlegroups.com palle...@googlegroups.com, Adrian Cole adrian...@gmail.com
Subject:  Re: Pallet and VMWare

There was a project for using vmfest agaist VMWare vDirector (I believe), and they got it working, but I don’t think it was ever released as open source…

What is your infrastructure?

—

Antoni Batchelli,
- twitter: @tbatchelli , @disclojure
--- email: tbatc...@gmail.com
----- web: tbatchelli.org , disclojure.org

----- gpg: public key

From: Adrian Cole adrian...@gmail.com
Reply: palle...@googlegroups.com palle...@googlegroups.com
Date: May 29, 2014 at 8:29:32 AM
To: palle...@googlegroups.com palle...@googlegroups.com
Subject:  Re: Pallet and VMWare

[Jonathan Woods]

I gather it's going to be vCentre 5.5 / ESXi 5.x.

I was hoping to prove Pallet etc with VirtualBox, which is all we currently have access to, in time to forestall the kneejerk "it must be Puppet" reaction when VMWare comes along.  It's a large installation, and would be a real coup.  The vbox stuff is going a bit too slowly, sadly, possibly due some fundamental lack of understanding on my part.

[tbatchelli]

That’d be quite a coup :)

Is the issue of shutting down nodes via WS the only thing slowing you down? If you let us know what you are intending to do we can provide some guidance.

I haven’t been able to reproduce node removal issue you’ve been experiencing, but that could be related to different latencies in the network not being high enough to trigger the race condition. I’ll dig into the code if i can see where this is happening.

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tbatchelli
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[Jonathan Woods]

The odd bit of guidance would be fantastic here and there, Toni.  We're about to achieve great things thanks to Pallet/VMFest/VMWare, and spread FP/Clojure too, so it makes the stumbling blocks all the more frustrating!  I freely admit they're as likely to be down to my general ignorance as to anything else.

There are lots of options for VMWare and Pallet.  We could speak to it directly, or via jclouds and a third party connector at that level, or via jclouds via Openstack... etc

The issue of shutting down nodes is certainly problematic.  We have a workaround - via VBoxManage - but it takes us out of Pallet world abruptly, and is bound to be more and more of a pain as we start throwing around whole multi-VM environments for various kinds of testing.  I'll investigate some more, and maybe instrument the underlying vboxjws dependency a bit.  I did think about forking the code and perhaps (configurably) ignoring 'invalid managed object reference' errors, and came across a trace on the web of someone having done this with VMWare's Java API too as it happens, but of course that's not ideal either.

By the way, is there anything special about your [org.clojars.tbatchelli/vboxjws "4.3.4"], or was it just a way of publishing vboxjws into Maven/Leiningen dependency world?  I believe I tried the latest from VMWare (4.3.12) and that made no difference, but I can have another go just in case my experiment wasn't valid.

Another problem has been in our understanding of using pallet-vmfest remotely, i.e. Pallet on one host, vboxwebsrv and VirtualBox on another.  We've given up for now, and are shipping our Clojure code out to the host running VirtualBox.  I'll post a separate message on that, just to keep pallet-clj tidy.

Jon