VMware vSphere

You can bring up VMware vSphere environment using Terraform with builtin vSphere provider.

Prerequisites

Terraform

Install Terraform according to the guide.

Note: Minimum Terraform version of 0.6.16 required to leverage some newer features of the vSphere provider

VMware template

Create VMware template for microservices cluster. You will able to change CPU and RAM parameters while provisioning a virtual machine from template with Terraform. It’s recommended to disable SELinux. Create user and add public RSA keys for SSH into the $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys. It is required to have VMware tools in the template, because we need to populate resulting .tfstate file with IP addresses of provisioned machines. This configuration was tested on CentOS 7.1 x64.

Configuring vSphere for Terraform

Provider settings

vsphere_server, user and password are the required parameters needed by Terraform to interact with resources in your vSphere. allow_unverified_ssl parameter is reponsible for checking SSL certificates of the vCenter. If you have self-signed certificates it is necessary to set this parameter to true.

VSPHERE_USER

The vSphere username with the necessary permissions.

VSPHERE_PASSWORD

The password of the user.

Basic settings

datacenter is the name of datacenter in your vSphere environment. It is required if the vSphere has several datacenters.

cluster is the name of the cluster in the selected datacenter. It’s an optional parameter.

pool is the name of resource pool in vSphere. It’s an optional parameter. Requires full path to Pool such as Cluster_Name/Resources/Pool_Name

template is the name of a base VM or template you will deploy you machines from. Should include a path in VM folder hierarchy: folder/subfolder/vm-name

network_label is the label of the network assigned to the machines.

domain is the domain name to configure each host with.

dns_server1 & dns_server2 are the dns servers to configure on the hosts.

short_name is the prefix that will be used for the new virtual machines.

ssh_user is the username for the further service provisioning. This user has to be in the sudoers group with NOPASSWD option.

ssh_key is the path to the SSH private key.

control_volume_size is the size in GB to create the data drive for the control nodes

worker_volume_size is the size in GB to create the data drive for the worker nodes

edge_volume_size is the size in GB to create the data drive for the edge nodes

datastore is the name of the datastore to create the use for the new VMs

Microservices settings

control_count and worker_count are the number of nodes for specific roles.

consul_dc the name of datacenter for Consul configuration.

Optional settings

There are several optional settings that can be leveraged in the sample terraform file. Just uncomment the line and configure the desired value.

folder set this to the name of a folder to place the new virtual machines into under the Datacenter object. Folder must exist already.

control_cpu is the number of vCPUs to deploy for control nodes.

worker_cpu is the number of vCPUs to deploy for worker nodes.

edge_cpu is the number of vCPUs to deploy for edge nodes.

control_ram is the amount of vRAM in MBs to deploy for control nodes.

worker_ram is the number of vRAM in MBs to deploy for worker nodes.

edge_ram is the number of vRAM in MBs to deploy for edge nodes.

linked_clone setting this to true will deploy the VMs as linked clones. Default of false will create standard full clones for each VM. Note that performance of linked clones is dependent on the underlying servers and storage. In some cases linked_clone deployments have failed during installation where full clones work fine. If you get errors during the installation on a linked_clone setup, try using full clones and see if that fixes the error.

Advanced settings

You also can change advanced settings in module file terraform/vsphere/main.tf

configuration_parameters are the custom parameters, for example specific service role.

Provisioning

Once you’re all set up with the provider, customize your module, run terraform get to prepare Terraform to provision your cluster, terraform plan to see what will be created, and terraform apply to provision the cluster. At the end of provisioning Terraform will perform commands to change hostnames for correct service work. You can change this behavior in the provisioner section for each resource in the terraform/vsphere/main.tf file. Due to a timing condition when requesting a MAC address from the vsphere server (ethernet0.addressType = "vpx") you may have to apply without the provisioner for a first time and issue terraform apply (with provisioner) afterwards. This will allow the guest tools to provide the IP addresses.

Afterwards, you can use the instructions in getting started to install Mantl on your new cluster.