Packer, Photon, Python, Flask, WSGI, vROps. Holy smokes folks.. I’m not sure I could make a more click-bait-y post if I tried!
I recently took a position at a new company and had the opportunity to stand up a greenfield environment. Part of this environment was obviously configuring monitoring. Since we’re pretty heavily tied to VMware here, we’re using vROps for our monitoring. For escalation of alerts, we’re using OpsGenie, and for normal collaboration we’re using Teams. Unfortunately, vROps versions older than 8.4 do not support sending alerts to OpsGenie or Teams out of the box. Fortunately, we can still get this working with a bit of work.
In the first part of this series we went over Terraform at a very high level and discussed a basic example of using it to provision a single Windows VM or a single Linux VM. While this is a helpful baseline, it doesn’t realistically help us when defining our application structure in code. For example, if you wanted to set up a three tier application you’ll need to have three separate instances of the project we used. At that point we’re not really gaining much efficiency over deploying a template in vCenter. In this post I’ll discuss Terraform Modules, give an example of how to store your Terraform Module in GitHub, and provide a real-life example of how to deploy a three tier application using multiple source images.
With everything going on in the world with COVID-19 and the social distancing that is happening, people are looking to connect with friends, family and co-workers via Video conferencing more than ever. Recent vulnerabilities in Zoom have made people more cognizant than ever that security needs to be considered when using these platforms no matter what you are using them for.
Jitsi is an open source video conferencing platform that I’ve been hearing about a lot lately, and finally had a chance to look into. In this post I’ll explain how to use Terraform to provision a Jitsi instance when you need a conference and tear it down when you are done. We’ll be using Vultr and their Jitsi “application” and AWS Route 53 for DNS.
As a part of my effort to use Infrastructure as Code to define and automate VMware environments, I’m taking a look at Terraform for VMware provisioning. In this article, I will give a brief intro to Terraform, talk about how it can help in managing your enterprise environments, as well as how it’s different than Ansible. I’ll also provide example code and description for how to provision Windows and Linux VMs.
VMware Templates: they make life amazing, don’t they? Creating a your first vSphere template is easy, but there are limitations when using them in enterprise environments. In this article, I will talk about the downsides of traditional enterprise template management, how Packer can help, and give examples (and code!) for creating Windows and Linux templates in VMware vCenter using Packer.