Cloud Assembly Services – Page 3

VMware released some Ansible enhancements within the last couple of weeks.

First is the ability to use the private IP of the deployed machine. Prior the this fix, disabling the public IP threw and error and the deployment failed.

To disable the assignment of a pubic IP (default), simply add ‘assignPublicIpAddress: false‘ in the network properties.

Cloud_Machine_1:
  type: Cloud.Machine
  properties:
    remoteAccess:
      keyPair: id_rsa
      authentication: keyPairName
      image: CentOS 7
      flavor: generic.tiny
      attachedDisks:
        - source: '${resource.Cloud_Volume_1.id}'
      networks:
        - network: '${resource.Cloud_Network_1.id}'
          assignPublicIpAddress: false

By default, vRAC will use the private ip address of the first NIC on the machine.

Just a few things about the placement of the machines. First my Ansible Control Host (ACH) is on a Public AWS subnet. My first attempt to install NGINX on a machine deployed to the same subnet failed as it could not find the repo. After some troubleshooting I determined the new machine needs to be deployed on a private subnet, with a NAT Gateway. Oh and make sure the ACH can connect to the deployed machine on TCP port 22 (SSH).

The second was having the ability to send extra variables to the ACH. Here the use case is to join an AWS backed Windows server to a domain using an ansible playbook.

Ansible extra variables can be added under the properties in the Ansible component. Here I’m going to add several just to demonstrate what it looks like.

Cloud_Ansible_1:
  type: Cloud.Ansible
  properties:
    host: '${resource.Cloud_Machine_1.*}'
    osType: linux
    account: ansible-control-host
    username: centos
    privateKeyFile: /home/ansibleoss/.ssh/id_rsa
    playbooks:
    provision:
      - /home/ansibleoss/playbooks/centos-nginx/playbook.yml
    groups:
      - linux
    hostVariables:
      bluePrintName: BP- ${env.blueprintName}
      message: Hello World
      domain: corp.local
      orgUnit: ou=sample,dc=corp,dc=local
      disks:
        disk1:
          size: '${resource.Cloud_Volume_1.capacityGb}'
          label: '${input.disk1_label}'
        disk2:
          size: 20
          label: Fake disk

These variables are stored in /etc/ansible/host_vars/vra_user_host_vars.yml.

This is the resulting YAML file for this blueprint request.

vra_user_host_vars

They also changed the default connection type to winrm (default is SSH) if the osType is set to ‘windows’.

This will be the topic of my next article.

Stay tuned.

My current customer is looking at using VMware Cloud Assembly Services (CAS) for their next generation SDDC. It looked like CAS would be able to address some of their Ansible and other OS customization use cases.

Ubuntu cloud ready OVA works great, but unfortunately a cloud ready CentoOS OVA was not available (they use RHEL and CentOS as their primary Linux Distro).

Well it took me a bit, but was able to build an OVA that worked. Here is how I did it.

First I built a clean CentOS 7.x image using the minimal install ISO. I’m not going through this step by step as its been well documented else where.

Secondly, make sure to change the CD ROM back to client after reboot. Do not leave it pointed at one on a datastore, even if it is not connected at power on. Why? Well a Cloud-Init ISO is mounted on the machine when it powers up. CI failed to run when I left the CD pointed at and ISO on a datastore.

After the initial reboot, I simply updated the machine, and installed open-vm-tools and cloud-init.

#yum update -y

#yum install -y open-vm-tools cloud-init

Then cleaned up the machine.

#cloud-init clean --logs

#sys-unconfig

This last command will return the machine to an uninstalled state, and shut it down.

Next, within vCenter I enabled the vApp Options.

Then gave the appliance a name and added a few properties.

And finally enable ISO as the environment transport.

vAppTransport

After saving the settings, I converted it into a template and imported it into CAS.

From there I created a new Image Mapping, and gave it a try in CAS.

CentosCloudInitSuccess

The blueprint and Ansible playbook can be found at this github repository.

Category: Cloud Assembly Services

vRealize Automation Cloud Ansible Enhancements

CentOS Image for Cloud-init on VMWare Cloud Assembly Services