Automate your VMware configuration with Puppet

Steer the Sphere

In addition to supporting hypervisors such as Amazon EC2 and Google GCE, Puppet lends itself to the use of VMware vSphere. A private cloud created with Puppet and vSphere is superior to public clouds in two respects: In addition to far lower total cost of ownership, given 24/7 use, you also benefit from increased data security with local hosting. In this article, I target IT managers with Puppet experience who thus far have not looked into the use of the product's cloud service modules.

Test Infrastructure

Establishing a complex VMware infrastructure requires huge hardware investments, so instead, I used a VMware Workstation as the basis of my setup. To understand the process, though, you need a workstation with at least eight cores, 16GB of RAM, and 100GB of hard disk storage space. The host operating system is Windows 8 for simplicity's sake – a 64-bit version is mandatory – and VMware Workstation should be installed as usual.

Puppet networks can be controlled by a master, which must be a Linux system. The first step is thus to set up a virtual machine with Ubuntu. Be frugal with the hardware resources; ESX just loves burning up the remaining computing power for virtual machines and the vCenter appliance.

In the next step, log in to your Puppet master system and download the tarball with Puppet Enterprise [1]. After starting the installation wizard, you can accept all the defaults, because you are generating a test installation only.

While the installation process is running, the Ubuntu host needs additional resources. Even though only 3GB of RAM and two processor cores are required, the installation takes two to three hours. After the installation, if you see a warning regarding the MCollective package, you will have to install it manually. Because of a known bug, you also must install the STOMP library before the

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