Re: [Puppet Users] Re: Puppet with VMWare ESX

Matthew Marlowe
Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:39:58 -0000

>
> Not at all, Puppet with vmware guest platforms is fantastic.
>
+1

More to the point, puppet seems best at allowing rapid scale out of applications
via virtualization.  Our policy is to deploy all linux virtual machines via
puppet.

It is the physical machines serving as hypervisors or as critical cluster
management/infrastructure that we don''t let puppet currently touch.

> We have a procedure in place that uses kickstart with CentOS and
> puppet for post-install configuration that can bring a system up and
> on the net and with all packages installed in under 10 minutes. We
> deploy hosts constantly using this method, and each new host comes up
> already puppet-managed, with vmware tools installed, and ready for
> final configuration.
>

We currently do cloning of a template VM for new rhel nodes.  We''ve
avoided kickstart because a) we already have to go into vcenter to
create/configure new vms properly and b) there isn''t much that
kickstart would give us we don''t already get from cloning and running
scripts after clone.  When/if we can get to a point that puppet dashboard can
tell vcenter to spawn a new vm, provision appropriate virtual hardware and vm
settings, start kickstart, and then start puppet, then we''ll switch to
that :)

-Matt
--
Matthew Marlowe - http://www.deploylinux.net/
CEO @ DeployLinux Consulting, Inc
matt@deploylinux.net, 858-400-7430