chef-provisioning-vra

Chef Provisioning driver for vRealize Automation

Configuring and Usage

First, configure Chef Provisioning with your vRA server and authentication information. One option is to place a driver_options section in your knife.rb:

driver_options username: 'my@email.address',
               password: 's00pers33cret',
               tenant: 'vsphere.local',
               verify_ssl: false,
               max_wait_time: 1800

username, password, and tenant are required.

verify_ssl is optional and defaults to true. If you cannot configure your client or server with trusted certificates, you can set this to false.

max_wait_time is the number of seconds to wait for any operation where a request was submitted to vRA and Chef Provisioning must wait for it to complete. By default, this is 600.

Secondly, in your recipe, configure your bootstrap and transport options for your machine(s). You can do this using the with_machine_options method, or you can pass it directly to each machine's machine_options property:

machine_options = {
  bootstrap_options: {
    catalog_id: '7bd5f299-8c34-41f6-b63f-c2ac410ee0b6',
    subtenant_id: 'my_subtenant_uuid',
    cpus: 1,
    memory: 1024,
    requested_for: 'my@email.address',
    lease_days: 30,
    key_path: '/path/to/ssh/key'
  },
  transport_options: {
    is_windows: false,
    username: 'ubuntu',
  }
}

Driver URL

The driver URL should be vra:https://my-vra-host.com. Like any other Chef Provisioning driver, you may set this a variety of ways, including the with_driver method in your recipe:

with_driver 'vra:https://vra.corp.local' do
  ... my machines here ...
end

Bootstrap Options

The following properties are required:

• catalog_id
• cpus
• memory
• requested_for

subtenant_id is required if your catalog item is a global item and not tied to a specific business group / subtenant.

If you wish to use SSH keys, you must specify a key_path or key_name. Failure to specify one of those will cause an error. If you wish to use password authentication, specify a password in the transport_options.

You may specify additional extra parameters to be passed to the vRA API using the extra_parameters property hash:

bootstrap_options: {
  extra_parameters: {
    parameter1_name: {
      type: 'string',
      value: 'my value'
    },
    parameter2_name: {
      type: 'integer',
      value: 2
    }
  }
}

If your parameter name contains a hyphen, such as when you're passing in "provider" parameters, you will need to use the older "hash rocket" syntax:

bootstrap_options: {
  extra_parameters: {
    'provider-MyCustomProperty' => {
      type: 'string',
      value: 'my value'
    }
  }
}

Transport Options

All transport options are optional.

• is_windows: set this to true if you are creating a windows machine. Unfortunately, you must set this manually as vRA does not offer a consistent method for determining this through the API.
• username: set this to the SSH or WinRM user to use when logging in. Defaults to root on Unix and Administrator on Windows. On Unix, if a non-root user is supplied, Chef Provisioning will attempt to use sudo to gain the required privileges.
• password:
  • Windows: required. Set to the user's password to use to log in via WinRM.
  • Unix: optional. If set, SSH key authentication will not be used.

Resources

Only the machine resource is supported.

License and Authors

Author:: Chef Partner Engineering (partnereng@chef.io)

Copyright:: Copyright (c) 2015 Chef Software, Inc.

License:: Apache License, Version 2.0

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/vmware-vra-gem/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request