VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale [V6] – On Demand Review

This has been cross posted from my own blog vGemba.net. Go check it out!

I recently was able to take the VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale [V6] – On Demand course from VMware. Why On Demand and not in a Classroom format? Simple – travel time and costs. I was actually looking for the Design & Deploy Fast Track course but annoyingly it seem to be scheduled very infrequently and only in London. With family and work commitments taking a week out to attend was pretty impossible.

So I started looking at the On Demand option. I was scheduled to take the VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam so the O&S On Demand course seemed like a good fit. This was my first time trying an On Demand course instead of Instructor led in class training. The interface is based on the Hands on Labs so if you are familiar with that you will be comfortable using it. The modules covered were: Continue reading

Scottish VMUG – 26th October 2017

This has been cross posted from my own blog vGemba.net. Go check it out!

On Thursday 26th October 2017 the second Scotland VMUG of the year happened. An amazing event!

There were 140 registered and I am sure there was well over 100 actually attended. Numbers seem to go from strength to strength and I am sure it’s due to the hard work the leaders do in securing great speakers and content. Three VCDX’s in one day? Yes please.

First up was Duncan Epping on “Evolution of vSAN”. First up he detailed the development of the product – 50x growth predicted from 2010 – 2020. Pretty impressive. We then saw some upcoming features in vSAN. These included:

  • Live view of disks in the server
  • LED blink on and off
  • Simplified cluster creation
  • Proactive support – vSAN calls home to VMware and GSS can call you
  • Snapshots will be better
  • 1 – 2 minute VM recovery

The biggest thing mentioned for me was full stack upgrades coming. Using VUM you can perform complete firmware and driver updates of the entire server stack from BIOS up. This will certainly help me push vSAN over another product. Thanks Duncan!

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Terraform with vSphere – Part 4

This has been cross posted from my own blog vGemba.net. Go check it out!

Wrap up

We have barely scratched the surface with Terraform. It is a very powerful piece of software that can do much more than building a single VM from a template. I do find the documentation around the vSphere provider to be lacking and there is not much out there on the internet on using it with vSphere, so it’s been a lot of experimentation for me but very enjoyable.

I first started playing with Terraform after watching Nick Colyer’s excellent Pluralsight course Automating AWS and vSphere with Terraform. It gives good demo driven examples similar to what I have shown in this series but goes further by delving into Modules, local provisoners, remote provisioners, etc. If you have Pluralsight access go check it out.

I also found this series of posts from Gruntwork to be excellent. The posts have actually been converted into a book called Terraform: Up & Running so you should go check it out.

Finally I also found these posts to be helpful:

Don’t forget the official documentation on Terraform.io – sometimes you just have to RTFM.

As you have found Terraform is easy to pick up and you can see results very quickly. It’s given me the bug to dig deeper and see what I can apply at work.

Good luck in your Terraform journey!

Terraform with vSphere – Part 3

This has been cross posted from my own blog vGemba.net. Go check it out!

Introduction

In Part 1 and Part 2 we downloaded, setup, and then created a simple VM using Terraform. Let’s look how to use variables and the files required for this.

Existing Code

Let’s look at the code from Part 2:

provider "vsphere" {
    user = "[email protected]" # You need to use this format, not example\username
    password = "Password1"
    vsphere_server = "vcenter.corp.contoso.com"

    # If you use self-signed certificates
    allow_unverified_ssl = true
}

resource "vsphere_virtual_machine" "webserver" {
    name = "webserver1"
    vcpu = 1
    memory = 2048

network_interface {
    label = "VM Network"
}

disk {
   datastore = "datastore"
   template = "MicroCore-Linux"
}

}

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Terraform with vSphere – Part 2

This has been cross posted from my own blog vGemba.net. Go check it out!

Introduction

In Part 1 of this series we went about installing Terraform, verifying it was working and setting up Visual Studio Code. In this part we will cover some Terraform basics.

Terraform Components

The three Terraform Constructs we are going to look at are:

  • Providers
  • Resources
  • Provisioners
Providers

Providers are the resources or infrastructure we can interact with in Terraform. These can include AWS, Azure, vSphere, DNS, etc. A full list is available on the Terraform website. As you can see it’s a very big list. In this series we will concentrate on the VMware vSphere Provider.

Resources

Resources are the things we are going to use in the provider. In the vSphere realm this can be a Virtual Machine, Networking, Storage, etc.

Provisioners

Terraform uses Provisioners to talk to the back end infrastructure or services like vSphere to create your Resources. They essentially are used to execute scripts to create or destroy resources.

Setup Terraform for vSphere

Open up Visual Studio Code and create a new file called main.tfin the folder C:\Terraform. If you have added C:\Terraform to your Path environment variable save main.tf anywhere you like, but of course the best place for all of your Terrform files is source control…

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Terraform with vSphere – Part 1

This has been cross posted from my own blog vGemba.net. Go check it out!

Introduction

Terraform is one of the new products that let you treat infrastructure as Code. What does Infrastructure as Code actually mean?
According to Wikipedia:

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

In the case of Terraform this means using code to *declare* what we want from vSphere, AWS, Azure, OpenStack etc. and then Terraform goes and creates the infrastructure to our declared final state. This is the opposite to Procedural Infrastructure where we have to describe *how* to get our end result. Terraform does the hard work in figuring out how to create the infrastructure we have defined – we don’t have to worry how to actually create it or the sequence of steps to get there.