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:

• Martin Rusev – Building your infrastructure with Terraform – Review and Walkthrough
• Emil Wypych – Deploying vSphere VM with Terraform

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!

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 = "username@corp.contoso.com" # 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"
}

}

Continue reading →

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

Introduction

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.