Automate Region Deployment

Question
#1

Hi guys,

Has anyone managed to deploy a manageiq/cloudforms region automatically? I was thinking of using terraform to deploy images to vmware vsphere and trigger ansible provider to configure the appliances.

I have found an example for ansible part: https://github.com/adamgoossens/cf-ansible
However, I am having an issue with deploying a vsphere image from terraform. It’s not catching up the guest os customization and therefore is not configuring network.

In general, is there any best practices for automatic cf/manageiq deployment? Given that region in our case can consist of around 20 vms, it’s preferable to automate the process.

Br,
Anton

#2

We use a VMware template and Customizations Specs to clone the appliances and configure an IP address. Once the Appliances have an IP a big Ansible Playbook takes it from there.

Pretty low tech, but we only have to do it once every 1 or 2 years, so it is manageable :slight_smile: We too have about 20 VMs

#3

Hi @buc,

Thanks for your input. This means I am doing something wrong :slight_smile:
I’ve tried to apply custom specs via vCenter directly and via terraform, and it fails with error:

Customization of the guest operating system ‘rhel7_64Guest’ is not supported in this configuration. Microsoft Vista ™ and Linux guests with Logical Volume Manager are supported only for recent ESX host and VMware Tools versions. Refer to vCenter documentation for supported configurations.

Although, the same custom spec works fine on a simple rhel8 template. We have vSphere version 6.7 and tools in vm are recent.

Could this be the issue in cloudforms template? The version I was testing on is 5.10.3.3-1 and 5.11.0.18-1.

#4

Which OS/Version is set on the rhel8 template? vCenter has no idea which OS is in the template, you could try changing the label on the template

If it works on rhel8 it is probably going to work on rhel7.

(In case you still need help, it took me 2 weeks to reply :sunglasses:)