Technology

If you’re brand new to Ansible but have some vRealize Automation and Orchestration experience, this post will get you started with a configuration management tool. The goal in this example is to deploy a CentOS server from vRealize Automation and then have Ansible configure Apache and deploy a web page. It assumes that you have no Ansible server setup, but do have a working vRealize Automation instance. If you need help with setting up vRealize Automation 7 take a look at the guide here. ...

The number of clusters that should be used for a vSphere environment comes up for every vSphere design. The number of clusters that should be used isn’t a standard number and should be evaluated based on several factors. Number of Hosts Let’s start with the basics, if the design calls for more virtual machines than can fit into a single cluster, then it’s obvious that multiple clusters must be used. The same is true for a design that calls for more hosts that can fit into a single cluster or any other cluster maximums. ...

If you do a lot of work with orchestration, you’re almost certain to be familiar with working with a REST API. These REST APIs have become the primary way that different systems can interact with each other. How about database operations? How about the ability to use a generic database to house CMDB data, change tracking or really anything you can think of. I came across a nifty program called DreamFactory that allows us to add an API to our databases. The examples in this post are all around MS SQL Server, but it also has support for PostgreSQL, NO SQL, SQL Lite, DB2, Salesforce and even Active Directory or LDAP. ...

vRealize Code Stream now comes pre-packaged with JFrog Artifactory which allows us to do some cool things while we’re testing and deploying new code. To begin this post, lets take a look at what an artifactory is and how we can use it. An artifactory is a version control repository, typically used for binary objects like .jar files. You might already be thinking, how is this different from GIT? My Github account already has repos and does its own version control. True, but what if we don’t want to pull down an entire repo to do work? Maybe we only need a single file of a build or we want to be able to pull down different versions of the same file without creating branches, forks, additional repos or committing new code? This is where an artifactory service can really shine. ...

By now, we’re probably Jenkins experts. So lets see how we can use Jenkins with vRealize Code Stream. To give you a little background, vRealize Code Stream is a release automation solution that can be added to VMware’s vRealize Automation solution. It’s a nifty little tool that will let us deploy a server from blueprint, call some Jenkins jobs and deploy code from an artifactory repository. One of the best features is that you can build your release in stages and have gating rules between them so you can automate going from Development to UAT to Production or whatever else you can think of. ...

If you’ve been following the rest of this series about using Jenkins, you’re starting to see that there are a lot of capabilities that can be used to suit whatever use case you have for deploying and testing code. This post focuses on a great plugin that was recently pushed out by Kris Thieler (aka inkysea) and Paul Gifford. These guys have published a Jenkins Plugin for vRealize Automation. Just like we’ve done in other posts, the first step is to install the plugin in the Manage Plugins section of Jenkins. ...

in previous posts we discussed how you can use Jenkins to test various pieces of code including Powershell. Jenkins is a neat way to test your code and have a log of the successes and failures but let’s face it, you were probably testing your code as you were writing it anyway right? Well, what if you could push your code to GIT and have that code tested each time a GIT push was executed? Then you can have several people working on the same code and when the code gets updated in your repositories, it will be tested and logged. This makes it really nice to see when the code stopped working and who published the code to GIT. Now we’re really starting to see the power of this CI/CD stuff. ...

In the previous post we discuss how to setup a Windows Node to test PowerShell code. In this post, we’ll configure a new Jenkins project to test some very basic PowerCLI code. To start, we need to have some basics setup on our Windows Node that we setup previously as a slave. In our case, we need to make sure that we have PowerCLI installed on the host. Let’s think about this logically for a second. Jenkins is going to tell our Windows node to execute some PowerCLI scripts as a test. If the Windows node doesn’t understand PowerCLI, then our tests just won’t work. I would suggest that you install PowerCLI on your Windows node and then do a quick test to make sure you can connect to your vCenter server. ...

Not all of your Jenkins projects will consist of “Hello World” type routines. What if we want to run some PowerShell jobs? Or better yet, PowerCLI? Our Jenkins instance was built on CentOS and doesn’t run Windows PowerShell very well at all. Luckily for us, in situations like this, we can add additional Jenkins nodes and yes they can also be Windows hosts! Login to your Jenkins Instance and go to Manage Jenkins and then click on Manage Nodes. ...

In this post we’ll create a Jenkins project on our brand new shiny server that we just deployed. The project we create will be very simple but should show off the possibilities of using a Jenkins server to test your code. To get started login to your Jenkins server at the http://jenkinsservername:8080 port and then click the “New Item” link. From there give your new project a name. In this example our project is a Freestyle project which will let us throw code right into the project and run it on the Jenkins server or subsequent Jenkins Nodes. ...