VMware and open source puppet

[Dhanarajan Ponnurangam]

Hi All,

I am very new to puppet an vmware.

I have a hardware server with ESX5.1 installed in it. I have a Linux server (Centos) running open source puppet.
I need to create a VM on this hypervisor by using this puppet master.

Can anyone please help me in understand the list of required packages that needs to be installed on the puppet master to get this done.
It will be great if some one can share the puppet master configurations that needs to be done to create and manage VM's using puppet.

Appreciate your inputs on the same.

Regards,
Dhanarajan.P

[Dhanarajan Ponnurangam]

Can anyone help from puppet user group. Appreciate your inputs on the same.

[Felix Frank]

Hi,

it's not clear what software is installed where currently, hypervisor or
CentOS VM.

How should your final setup be laid out?

[Dhanarajan Ponnurangam]

Hi Felix,

Thanks again for your reply,

Please let me know if my understanding is right here,

1. I need to install puppet agent as per http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/puppetlabs_package_repositories.html#for-red-hat-enterprise-linux-and-derivatives in to my server hardware where ESX5.1 is installed ? Please let me know. If yes, do I need to remove ESX 5.1 from the server hardware and install a Centos and then do the above puppet agent installation ? Sorry if any of these questions are trivial and stupid as I am totally new to puppet and vmware world.

Regards,
Dhanarajan.P

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Felix Frank <Felix...@alumni.tu-berlin.de>
Date: Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Puppet Users] VMware and open source puppet
To: Dhanarajan Ponnurangam <kpdh...@gmail.com>


Hi,

please keep answers on-list.

Setting up agent machines is simple. Just install the puppet package,
yum will take care of all dependencies. Here's how to set up yum:
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/puppetlabs_package_repositories.html#for-red-hat-enterprise-linux-and-derivatives

Once that's up and running, follow the instructions in
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/installation.html#post-install

HTH,
Felix

On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 23:32:34 UTC-8, Dhanarajan Ponnurangam wrote:

[Felix Frank]

Hi.

No. Don't remove ESX. That's not was I was implying.

From your original inquiries, I was under the impression that you meant
to deploy Centos VMs by whatever means and use puppet to configure their
operating system.

Apparently, what you are attempting is the provisioning of the VMs
themselves using puppet. Is that correct?

I don't know much about ESX. But I doubt the puppet agent is functional
on this platform. There is little benefit to installing puppet for the
sole purpose of deploying VMs, anyway. That is, puppet doesn't give you
much more power or convenience than a custom script.

There's not much more advice I can dispense on this. Perhaps there is
someone with more ESX knowledge on the list.

HTH,
Felix

On 12/04/2013 12:48 AM, Dhanarajan Ponnurangam wrote:
> Hi Felix,
>
> Thanks again for your reply,
>
> Please let me know if my understanding is right here,
>
> 1. I need to install puppet agent as per
> http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/puppetlabs_package_repositories.html#for-red-hat-enterprise-linux-and-derivatives
> <http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/puppetlabs_package_repositories.html#for-red-hat-enterprise-linux-and-derivatives>
> in to my server hardware where ESX5.1 is installed ? Please let me know.
> If yes, do I need to remove ESX 5.1 from the server hardware and install
> a Centos and then do the above puppet agent installation ? Sorry if any
> of these questions are trivial and stupid as I am totally new to puppet
> and vmware world.

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[Dan White]

VMWare ESX(i) runs on bare metal. ( http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-ESX-and-VMware-ESXi-DS-EN.pdf )
So you would not install Puppet on the same server (directly)

[Dhanarajan Ponnurangam]

Thanks Felix,

You are right. I wanted to created, configure and manager VM's in the ESX server with the help of puppet.

Can anyone in the group help on this regard. Appreciate a lot.

Regards,
Dhanarajan.P

On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 23:32:34 UTC-8, Dhanarajan Ponnurangam wrote:

[Dhanarajan Ponnurangam]

Thanks Ygor for your reply.

Could you please eloborate on your statement. I understand that ESX is installed in the bare metal server. Now I need to create VM's in this server through puppet.
What are the hardware and software resource I may need to accomplish this.

It will be of great help if you can give more inputs on the same.

Regards,
Dhanarajan.P

On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 23:32:34 UTC-8, Dhanarajan Ponnurangam wrote:

[Rich Burroughs]

If you are using Puppet Enterprise, it does have support for provisioning VMs though Puppet:

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/pe/latest/cloudprovisioner_vmware.html

If you're using the open source Puppet, I'm not aware of a way to do that (I'm not saying there's not a way, just that I don't know of one). But once you have provisioned the nodes some other way and have them running, you can manage them through Puppet at that point.

Rich

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[Dhanarajan Ponnurangam]

Thanks Rich. Seems open source does not support creating VM's.
I learnt that Razor is another package which can be used to create VM's in a bare metal. Let me try exploring that. Thanks all for your support.

Regards,
Dhanarajan.p

On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 23:32:34 UTC-8, Dhanarajan Ponnurangam wrote:

[Klavs Klavsen]

I believe vagrant has gotten vmware support - so one can use it to disperse vms in vmware esx servers.

It's not a free extension though: http://www.vagrantup.com/vmware#learn-more

But it's fairly simple powershell scripting to create vms - so one could rather easily write a powershell script, which takes arguments from command-line-  and then create vms with exec.