VMDeploy

Spin up VMware Virtual Machines from a simple web page.

No Windows required.

Deployment process

• A master template VM (master_template_vmname) exists on the VCenter.

• The template has got a certain number of clones (valid_pool_vmname). They are all up and running within the same VCenter folder (pool_folder), and constitute the pool of ready-to-be-deployed VMs. Template and pool VMs are identical except for the dynamic IP they receive via DHCP.

• When a User wants to spin up a new machine, a pool VM gets selected.

• The pool VM is then bootstrapped by:

  • Installing Puppet (from the official repo, only if it doesn't already exist).
  • Dropping a Puppet manifests tarball on it, along with a couple of scripts (to unpack and apply the config) and a declared_classes.yaml file. In a nutshell: this is a masterless Puppet setup where everything is stored in /etc/puppet-it (to avoid messing with other Puppet related stuff that might end up on the VM), and the classes to declare come from an external node classifier script that takes the yaml file as input.
  • The Puppet config is applied. All it does at this stage is configuring the final IP address on the box, hostname, DNS servers and other network parameters.

• The pool VM is shut down, its harware parameters are changed according to the User's choices (RAM, CPU, VLAN, ...), then it's powered back on. It's also moved to a specific VCenter folder (destination_folder).

• If bootstrap was successful, a notification email is sent to the User (actually, to the configured owner , to the requestor and to support_email).

• Two more background jobs are created:

  • A cloner, to replace the ex pool VM (that just became a "real" server) with a fresh copy of the master template.
  • A mover that relocates - using Storage VMotion - the deployed VM to its final datastore (destination_datastore). This last step is necessary because, as far as I know, it's the only automatable way to rename a VM's on disk folder/files. Note that for this to work, starting from vSphere 5, you have to enable provisioning.relocate.enableRename on the vCenter Server. Check this KB article for details.

The app

• 100% Ruby (with a dash of Puppet), tested on Linux and Mac OS.

• Simple Web UI built on Sinatra.

• Relies on Google (Apps) for user authentication (allowed_users_regexps).

• Submits jobs to Resque, and uses resque-status for progress feedback.

• Uses Capistrano for production deployment.

• New VMs need free IP addresses. Those are stored in a DB (see models.rb).
  The User selects a VLAN group and the code tries to find a free IP on any of the VLANs that belong to the group. A candidate IP gets allocated and linked to a VM DB model. VLAN groups (along with network range, netmask, gateway, ...) are defined in the yaml config file.

Misc

You can use scripts/console.rb to interact with the DB or to create Jobs.

$ RACK_ENV=production bundle exec ruby script/console.rb

You'll be dropped in a pry session:

[1] pry(main)> m = VMDeploy::Models
=> VMDeploy::Models
[2] pry(main)> m::Ip.first
=> #<VMDeploy::Models::Ip @id=1 @address="10.41.40.123" @vlan_id=1 @vm_id=6>
[3] pry(main)> m::Ip.first.vm
=> #<VMDeploy::Models::Vm @id=6 @name="gtest" @uuid="50315057-83da-e4d3-1139-dbbe36c3c5d5">

Say you want to "unlink" 10.41.40.123 from the VM it's been assigned to (thus freeing up the IP):

[4] pry(main)> m::Ip.first(:address => '10.41.40.123').update(:vm => nil)
=> true

And you also want to remove the VM that used to own that IP, maybe because it's been deleted on the VCenter:

[5] pry(main)> m::Vm.first(:name => 'gtest').destroy
=> true

Another easy thing to do with script/console.rb is submitting a Job. Here I'm creating a new master template clone called pool4.

[6] pry(main)> VMDeploy::Jobs::Cloner.create({'dst_vm_name'=>'pool4'})
=> "d79b0f8e638a77d15050bb8506f654f3"