What path to follow to get the hang of ManageIQ

Question
#1

Hi, my first post here.
I want to learn ManageIQ, OpenShift (Origin) and Ansible. At home I have a small ESXi environment and I want to use that as my base platform. Downloaded ManageIQ and have it up and running. Connected my vCenter Server and can see my inventory.

Now, if I want to be able to deploy CentOS 7 (to later run origin on), where do I start? I was hoping I could upload an ISO or point to an ISO and attach a script. Like I found a CentOS 6 script in ManageIQ.

I did manage to deploy a VM from an existing VMware VM Template, but changing names, IP, etc didn’t work.

So I’m mostly looking for a guide that says: to fully auto deploy a VM, you need to setup this and this and that. Then I will be able to use the startup guides to figure out how to configure this and this and that.

Hope someone can help.
Thanks!

1 Like
#2

Hi Gabrie,

welcome to the forum!

There are multiple ways to customize a VM. The easiest way is probably to create a centos template with VMware tools installed, and then use the built in support for VMware guest configuration to do a post-clone customization.

Go to Compute -> Infrastructure -> VMs, navigate to the template, and click on Lifecycle -> Clone this Template. You need to fill in a bunch of details, but the key part is on the “Customization” tab where you can select a customization template (which must be present in vCenter), and if you want override the values. Here you can specify the hostname, IP address and DNS name.

This way of provisioning is also called “classic” provisioning. The alternative would be using services. The relevant functionalities are under Services -> Catalogs where you can create new Service Items, add them to a Catalog, and make them available for self service. The ordering can be done via the main UI (called the “ops UI”) or via the new self service UI (at /self_service).

Some relevant pointers for exploring ManageIQ further:

We also have a lot of resident experts here like @pemcg, @ramrexx and @jmarc that can help out.

3 Likes
#3

start here:

https://pemcg.gitbooks.io/mastering-automation-in-cloudforms-and-manageiq/content/chapter1.html

it’s pretty gentle.

David

1 Like
#4

Thank you!