Preface

This document describes the functionality provided by the vSphere plugin.

See the Deployit Reference Manual for background information on Deployit and deployment concepts.

Overview

The vSphere plugin is a Deployit plugin that supports launching, provisioning and terminating hosts and environments on VMWare vSphere platform.

The vSphere plugin is part of the Deployit Cloud Pack. For more information about the Cloud Pack, see the Deployit Cloud Pack Manual.

Features

• Deploying vSphere templates as virtual machines from Deployit;
• Destroying previously deployed virtual machines;
• Combining vSphere virtual machines into environments which can be used for application deployment;
• Registering middleware as part of a created environment.

Requirements

• Deployit requirements

  • Deployit: version 3.9.2+
  • Other Deployit Plugins: cloud-plugin

• Infrastructural requirements

  • VMWare vSphere platform with vCenter 5.1+

Usage scenarios

This section describes the most common usage scenarios, further sections contain more detailed configuration instructions.

Creating a single host

In its simplest form, the vSphere plugin can deploy a single virtual machine from a template and register it in Deployit as a CI of type cloud.SshHost (when connecting to the host using SSH) or cloud.CifsHost (when connecting using CIFS). The resulting host CI can contain middleware CIs that are present on the host and can be used as a normal container for deployment. The host can also be destroyed, which causes Deployit to terminate the vSphere instance and remove the host CI and its children from the repository.

There is a special CI type vsphere.HostTemplate which is used as a template to define all information about the future virtual machine.

Creating an environment

For more information about combining cloud hosts into environments, see the Deployit Cloud Pack Manual.

Provisioning instantiated hosts

When deploying a virtual machine, the template may already have the desired middleware installed. If this is the case, a launched host will be ready for use as soon as it has finished booting. It is also possible to provision a host using Puppet, Chef or a shell command after launching it. This is supported via the the notion of a marker file. If the host template specifies a marker file, Deployit will poll the launched instance for its presence. When the file is found on the instance filesystem, Deployit will conclude the host is up and ready for deployment. The location of the marker file can be configured in the vsphere.HostTemplate.

See the section on the marker file in the Deployit Cloud Pack Manual for additional details on the polling process.

Note:

• it is the responsibility of the template to invoke the provisioning process and to create the marker file when provisioning is completed, signaling that the host and middleware are ready for deployment.
• marker files are only supported when the template is based on a Unix family OS.

Configuration instructions

vCenter credentials

The vSphere plugin requires access to vCenter in order to perform operations on vSphere platform. These credentials are specified under the Configuration root node in the repository using a vsphere.Credentials CI. The CI has a control task validateCredentials that can test that the credentials can be used to communicate with vCenter.

Host template

The next step is to define host template CIs (vsphere.HostTemplate). A host template describes a single host that can be launched on the vSphere platform. In addition to the generic host template properties, it allows some vSphere-specific properties.

See CI reference for list of vsphere.HostTemplate properties and their meaning.

See the Deployit Cloud Pack Manual for the generic properties.

Here is an example of an vSphere host descriptor:

<#escape x as x?xml>
  <list>
    <cloud.SshHost id="${hostsPath}/${hostTemplate.name}_${hostAddress}">
      <template ref="${hostTemplate.id}"/>
      <cloudId>${cloudId}</cloudId>
      <address>${hostAddress}</address>
      <#if hostTemplate.privateKeyFile??><privateKeyFile>${hostTemplate.privateKeyFile}</privateKeyFile></#if>
      <#if hostTemplate.username??><username>${hostTemplate.username}</username></#if>
      <#if hostTemplate.password??><password>${hostTemplate.password}</password></#if>
      <#if hostTemplate.os??><os>${hostTemplate.os}</os></#if>
      <#if hostTemplate.connectionType??><connectionType>${hostTemplate.connectionType}</connectionType></#if>
    </cloud.SshHost>
    <www.ApacheHttpdServer id="${hostsPath}/${hostTemplate.name}_${hostAddress}/httpd">
      <host ref="${hostsPath}/${hostTemplate.name}_${hostAddress}"/>
      <startCommand>sudo apachectl stop</startCommand>
      <startWaitTime>3</startWaitTime>
      <stopCommand>sudo apachectl stop</stopCommand>
      <stopWaitTime>3</stopWaitTime>
      <restartCommand>sudo apachectl restart</restartCommand>
      <restartWaitTime>10</restartWaitTime>
      <defaultDocumentRoot>/var/www</defaultDocumentRoot>
      <configurationFragmentDirectory>/etc/apache2/conf.d</configurationFragmentDirectory>
    </www.ApacheHttpdServer>
  </list>
</#escape>

Every vsphere.HostTemplate CI provides a validateDescriptor control task which processes the Freemarker template, parses the resulting XML and reports errors if something is wrong. No actual changes are made to the repository during execution of this control task.

Please note that:

• Hosts which you define here should be either cloud.SshHost or cloud.CifsHost.
• The cloud.SshHost or cloud.CifsHost in the template must contain the XML fragments for address, cloudId and template. These are needed for the proper functioning of the plugin.
• Since XML is being generated you have to make sure that values are properly encoded. You can achieve this by enclosing the template in <#escape x as x?xml>...</#escape>, or alternatively use ${exampleKey?xml}. See the Freemarker documentation for details.

Environment template

For more information about defining environment templates, see the Deployit Cloud Pack Manual.

Using the vSphere plugin

Please see the Deployit Cloud Pack manual for instructions on how to use the environment and host templates provided in the vSphere plugin.

Release notes

vSphere plugin version 3.9.3

Improvements:

• [DEPLOYITPB-4864] - Host template validation exposes password