I'm currently looking for a provisioning-solution to deploy, configure and customize VMs in a vSphere / vCenter environment automatically. By doing that, I would like to adopt some changes to each VM individually (e.g. by using different licence keys for different software products).
During my research, I found that vagrant in combination with the vagrant-vcenter plugin with the help of puppet and git (by having different branches for different kinds of VMs) is doing exactly what i want to achieve:
https://github.com/gosddc/vagrant-vcenter
Unfortunatly, this plugin is immature and still in a beta-state.
Does anyone of you know a suitable alternative (could also be commercial)?
I searched for the same since few months. There is no other way to do that currently except using the plugin and modifying it according to your requirements. There is no other commercial solution currently in place. I used the both the plugins vagrant-vcenter and vagrant-vcloud and I was able to do the basic provisioning stuff without issues. You will not have any issues until you want to customize a lot during deployment. Some of the customization you can achieve through scripts that you can run using puppet after the VM is provisioned on vCenter.
There are several libraries out there to interact with vCeneter. The one I use is https://github.com/rlane/rbvmomi. The code base is somewhat old, but so is vCenter. The Vagrant implementation is great for dev, but has several issues going to full blown staging or production environment. For the latter, a library to interact with the underlying API of vCenter such as rbvmomi is preferred.
Related
I am aware of the process to install WAS 8.5.5.x and 9.0.x versions using IM response file(s) but would like to know best practices and recommendations to perform WAS installation and upgrade on more than one server, to avoid manual errors and reduce time.
I am open to use to Ansible, Puppet or any other orchestration tools as well, but would like to know possible options if we are not allowed to use these tools.
Ultimate goal is to automate most of the setup/upgrade steps, if not all of them since when dealing with bunch of servers.
Thanks
Assuming you are referring to WebSphere Application Server traditional, take a look at the approaches described here, https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEQTP_9.0.0/com.ibm.websphere.installation.base.doc/ae/tins_enterprise_install.html, especially if you are working with larger scale deployments.
Consider creating master images and distributing them in a swinging profile-type setup. They make it easier and faster to install and apply updates since you only need to create images once and distribute many times. You have consistency across systems too.
You can then automate with your preferred automation technology.
We use ansible, simple and effectively.
True, you must of course develop a playbook that will be able to do all this.
So I've been agonizing over embracing a deployment/configuration management tool like Chef or Puppet for a good long while. Not because I have any hesitation about them in general, but because I don't think they are a good fit for our specific scenario.
As far as I can see, these types of tools are targeted at frequent/wide-scale deployments, where you need to roll out software to 10s-1000s of systems. In our environment, we have a collection of ~25 different web services spread across half a dozen runtimes, with 1-8 deployments of each in production currently. Our big deployment problem is that each of the services has a different deployment story, and it's entirely manual, so it tends to be time consuming and error prone. Another wrinkle is that different instances in production may be different versions of the software, so we may need to concurrently support multiple deployment stories for a single service.
So I feel like we need something more like Ant/Maven/Rake, which is customized for each service. However, my experience with those is they are generally focused on local operations, and specific to a given language/runtime.
Is there a runtime-agnostic framework for describing and orchestrating building/testing/deployment in the manner I'm interested in?
I'm sure if I hit them long enough, I could get Rake or Puppet to do these for me, but I'm looking for something built for this purpose.
(Oh, and to make things worse, everything runs on Windows)
Thanks!
Here's another alternative you might want to consider: kwatee (I'm affiliated) is a free lightweight deploiement tool which besides having a web management interface can also integrate with ant (or maven or anything else with python CLI) to automate build & deploiement on dev/test environments for instance.
One of the nice things is the web configuration interface which make it pretty easy to quickly configure your deploiment stories, i.e. which software/version goes on which server. It's often necessary to setup different parameters in configuration files depending on the target server. For that you can "templatize" your packages using kwatee variable (similar to environment variables) which are configured with different values for each server.
Software must be registered in Kwatee's repository in the form of a folder of files, or an archive (zip, tar, tar.gz, bzip2, war) or a single file (e.g. an exe). Msi's are not supported. To deploy on windows kwatee needs the servers to have either telnet/ftp or ssh/scp (there are free tools out there).
Imagine you're going to manage a number of servers with a number of different services that's used by a number of people. Now say you want to reconfigure or replace some software on one of those servers. Obviously you don't want to work on servers that are in production.
If this was a code change, as a developer, I would make the change on my local development machine, test it locally and commit the change to a version control system. The changes could then be deployed in a staging environment, tested further and finally deployed in a production environment. It would also be easy for me to roll back, if necessary.
Generally, or specifically, how do you achieve this in system administration?
(The first thing that comes to mind is to use virtual machines and put virtual machine images in version control, but I'm sure there is a lot of literature and clever solutions I'm not presently aware of.)
Use chef or puppet to enforce machine configurations, and place their cookbooks and recipes under version control. Yes vms would make things easier but even physical server provioning can be controlled by kickstart or preeseed which can again be version controlled.
Question
Can anyone explain why it would be better to choose the puppet or chef vagrant provisioners, rather than the shell provisioner?
Background
I'm in the process of getting started with Vagrant. One of the things I'm having trouble with is deciding which provisioner to use. So far, I've had some success using the shell provisioner, but it has been more work than I expected to get it to run reliably.
At the moment, I'm not familar with ruby, puppet or chef, but I'm happy to learn any or all of them if I have to. My early experience playing with puppet and chef is that if someone else has a recipe that does exactly what you want, it works really well, but doing something non-standard means falling back coding up solution in ruby.
I'm aware of articles comparing puppet and chef, and I'm less worried about which of them to use, rather than knowing when and why I should use them at all.
Full disclosure: I'm a Puppet Labs employee. But I chose Puppet as a product over 2 years before joining them.
I would recommend that you use Puppet or Chef over shell if your configurations are going to a) have any degree of complexity and b) going to change over time - or you expect your installation environment itself to change in a way that might alter the way your deployment performs. Your scripts may be very good, but ultimately, unless you are following terrific programming practices around them, testing and QA'ing them, etc they are going to fail at some point.
There's an entire body of literate around DevOps discussing this notion, but it comes down to the principle of "technical debt" - we tend to do things the easy way now, and thus perceive them as simpler, at the cost of increasing complexity and difficulty later.
One of Puppet's strengths is its deterministic nature - the manifest you write must be able to be programmatically transformed by Puppet into a model of the server you are building. This is perceived by people as being more "difficult" but I would argue that the difficulty is lessened if you average it out along the curve of your technology's lifecycle. In other words, Puppet forces you to do your thinking now, but then deploy to scale with ease, rather than thinking later and re-engineering as you go. Pay in cash now, rather than by credit, with interest, later.
If you're purely pulling down other peoples' manifests, you're going to run into trouble at some point - although we would like it not to be so, working with Puppet today that's certainly the case, because they are writing them to address the general case, and not your particular system. Many general-purpose manifests become useful only when you reach a better understanding of Puppet.
So rather than start there, I'd work my way through the excellent Learning Puppet guide to start to grasp the basics. Puppet's learning curve is steep, but it levels off after a short while.
There are other reasons to use other provisioners or tools, but I'd surely argue that you are better with Puppet or Chef than trying to ensure that your shell scripts are doing exactly what you think they are supposed to do, for as long as you need to spawn new environments.
Ah, with the freedom of choice comes the complication of choosing what is right for you.
Chef Solo - Chef solo is most ideal if you’re just getting started with chef or a chef server is simply too heavy for your situation. Chef solo allows you to embed all your cookbooks within your project as well, which is nice for projects which want to keep track of their cookbooks within the same repository. Chef solo runs standalone – it requires no chef server or any other server to talk to; it simply runs by itself on the VM.
Chef Server - Chef server is useful for companies or individuals which manage many projects, since it allows you to share cookbooks across multiple projects. The cookbooks themselves are stored on the server, and the client downloads the cookbooks upon running.
Puppet - The Puppet provisioner runs stand-alone Puppet manifests that are stored on the server and downloaded to the client VM when it is created. The provisioner does not require a Puppet server and runs on the VM itself.
Puppet Server - The Puppet Server provisioner connects to a Puppet server and configures your client VM using node configuration on that server.
Other tools, shell scripts, etc. - Do you use something other than that which is built into Vagrant?
Provisioners are simply subclasses of Vagrant::Provisioners::Base, meaning you can easily build your own, should the need arise.
You can also check out the documentation, docs.vagrantup.com/v2
I would choose the Shell provisioner, then let the shell script clone your puppet/chef repository from github or bitbucket. The script can setup a ssh key to allow automated git clone. The benefits are most cloud providers support this as well so you can use the same script.This blog is explains git, puppet and vagrant well, one man and the cloud blog
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
Are there any tools for windows like that *nix world has? I am looking for something like Chef or Puppet.
I have found cfEngine but it still looks very *nix centric. Ideally it would be open source, and command line driven.
The idea is to put together an automated infrastructure with windows based servers. Our current IT department does not allow non-windows servers.
Chef is supported on Windows by Opscode. While we don't run Windows for any of our infrastructure, we do have developers who are continually improving our Windows support. We also get community contributions, and most of the early phase Windows functionality for Chef was contributed by the community.
Important: Opscode now provides an MSI installer for Chef on Windows. This makes it easier than ever to get Chef and Ruby installed on Windows.
While we have a lot of Unix/Linux background across our teams, our intention is that Windows is treated as a first class citizen. 2012 will be a big year for Chef and Windows. Keep an eye on the Opscode blog for announcements.
The following Chef Resources work on Windows:
Environment Resource: sets windows environment variables
User
Group
Mount
File
Gem Package
Remote File
Cookbook File
Template
Service
Ruby Block
Execute
That is, these are resources included in Chef itself. As Chef is extensible with cookbooks, many more resources are added through a variety of Windows specific cookbooks. Read on for more information.
You can get started with using Chef and Windows here:
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Fast+Start+Guide+for+Windows
Originally, Doug MacEchern wrote some cookbooks to do a number of things to automate windows, too.
https://github.com/dougm/site-cookbooks/tree/master/windows
This information and more available on the Chef Wiki:
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+Windows
Update
The following cookbook adds new resources to Chef to manage Windows:
http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/windows
It is an update/rewrite of Doug's fine resources from his repository linked above. Documentation is available on the Chef Wiki.
The following cookbook deploys PowerShell and provides a resource to run PowerShell commands/scripts directly in Chef Recipes:
http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/powershell
Documentation is available in the README.md included in the cookbook tarball.
Additional cookbooks for installing 7-zip, managing IIS and SQL Server have been added. Our "database" cookbook has been extended with a resource/provider for managing SQL Server databases and users (with the tds rubygem).
The knife-windows plugin for knife adds functionality for interacting with Windows systems to provision them with Chef installation.
Update: We have now added File ACL support for Windows to Chef, for all the usual file/directory suspects.
Cfengine Nova has had stable native support for Windows for years (i.e. no Cygwin is needed).
Everything that is possible on Unix (e.g. run commands, file copy, file edit, etc.) can also be done on Windows, with addition to Windows-specific features like
Registry management
File ACL permissions
Windows service management
Event log support
Advanced OS discovery (version, arch, service pack, network, domain, etc.)
For a short introduction, look in Section 11 of the Nova supplement manual: http://cfengine.com/files/Nova_Supplement.pdf
I have been looking for exactly the same thing.
I ran across Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration which purports to do many of the CM tasks you'd want to do with Chef/Puppet.
I am not going to give any opinion on it because I am still early in evaluating it - but if you're still looking for something, give this a shot.
Having had a deal of experience here i think that it really depends what you need to manage on a given box. Find your most common use case and ask a more specific question in terms of: whats the best tool for managing that. Things like IIS can be tricky (on older windows builds at least) and finding modules for CM tools to manage things like IIS settings and app pools can be hit and miss - especially when it comes to advanced settings (worker thready recycling springs to mind)
However Puppet has forge modules for more basic IIS settings which largely worked for me - and i really like the declarative format here - especially if you are managing large numbers of IIS servers
Also one of the major issues with Windows and configuration management is the lack of a proper package management solution - what actually comes in really handy here is something called Chocolatey (see http://chocolatey.org/) there is a plugin to use this as a provider in puppet - making the whole management process particularly easy. However i imagine that this can be integrated with other CM tools aswell - but does a great deal to help with installing software automatically in a windows environment
Though it is worth stating that whatever you end up using you will have to spend a while figuring out some odd bugs - windows and scripting/automation is not the best.
Based on my experience, I am glad to use such toolset:
Use powershell to manage the windows configuration. If only windows server, you can remotely execute the ps script.
If you like, suggest to use Puppet or Chef to distribute your powershell script into client.
If you like, suggest to use cygwin + (windows sshd) + crond to manage the shell-likely scripts which run in windows.
I think its better if you can use Microsoft System Center.
It a solution from the Microsoft to manage Microsoft base products form desktops to servers and all. Should give a try ...
How to Deploy Applications in Configuration Manager
Deploying Software and Operating Systems in System Center 2012
I don't recommend Chef unless you are a software developer who knows ruby. Chef is designed for software developers who want to manage IT infrastructure. Not for SysOps people who are the ones that actually end up managing it. It tries to treat IT infrastructure like code which is counter intuitive to how it actually works which is more like just data.
Puppet is more friendly for SysOps people imho but still can be complicated.
The good news is that there are other options as well. Less so for windows but projects like Puppet do support it reasonably well.