Vagrant VRealize Provider

This is a Vagrant 1.2+ plugin that adds a VMware vRealize Automation provider to Vagrant, allowing Vagrant to control and provision machines in VRealize.

NOTE: This plugin requires Vagrant 1.2+,

NOTE MORE: The version of the vmware-vra gem is locked to ~ 2.0 - as such this will only work with vRA 7.X. Restrict vmware-vra to ~ 1 to make this work with vRA 6.

NOTE EVEN MORE: This plugin is a work in progress. The basics work, but it's not as fully-featured as the vagrant-aws plugin it's largely based on.

What works

• Boot VRealize instances.
• SSH into the instances.
• Provision the instances with any built-in Vagrant provisioner.
• Minimal synced folder support via rsync.

Usage

Install using standard Vagrant 1.1+ plugin installation methods. After installing, vagrant up and specify the vrealize provider. An example is shown below.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-vrealize
...
$ vagrant up --provider=vrealize
...

Of course, prior to doing this, you'll need to obtain a VRealize-compatible box file for Vagrant.

Quick Start

After installing the plugin (instructions above), the quickest way to get started is to actually use the dummy VRealize box and specify all the details manually within a config.vm.provider block. So first, build the box:

$ rake box
$ vagrant box add --provider vrealize example_box/vrealize.box

And then make a Vagrantfile that looks like the following, filling in your information where necessary.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "vrealize"

  config.vm.provider :vrealize do |vrealize, override|
    # Note: you'll need to make sure your environment variables
    # are set up correctly for this bit...
    vrealize.vra_username = ENV['USER']
    vrealize.vra_password = ENV['PASSWORD']
    vrealize.vra_tenant   = ENV['VRA_TENANT']
    vrealize.vra_base_url = ENV['VRA_BASE_URL']

    # From here on are configuration settings for the specific VM
    # we're creating

    vrealize.requested_for = ENV['VRA_AD_USER']

    vrealize.subtenant_id = SOME_GUID
    vrealize.catalog_item_id = SOME_CATALOG_ID

    vrealize.add_entries do |extras|
      # This isn't actually needed, it's just here to show how to set custom
      # request data
      extras.string('provider-Vrm.DataCenter.Location', '')
    end


    override.ssh.username = "root"
    override.ssh.password = SOMETHING_SENSIBLE_HERE
  end
end

And then run vagrant up --provider=vrealize.

Networks

Networking features in the form of config.vm.network are not supported with vagrant-vrealize, currently. If any of these are specified, Vagrant will emit a warning, but will otherwise boot the VRealize machine.

Synced Folders

There is minimal support for synced folders. Upon vagrant up, vagrant reload, and vagrant provision, the Vrealize provider will use rsync (if available) to uni-directionally sync the folder to the remote machine over SSH.

See Vagrant Synced folders: rsync

Development

To work on the vagrant-vrealize plugin, clone this repository out, and use Bundler to get the dependencies:

$ bundle

If those install, you're ready to start developing the plugin. You can test the plugin without installing it into your Vagrant environment by just creating a Vagrantfile in the top level of this directory (it is gitignored) and add the following line to your Vagrantfile

Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-vrealize"

Use bundler to execute Vagrant:

$ bundle exec vagrant up --provider=vrealize

And Finally

This plugin is an unfinished work-in-progress. It (and large parts of this document) are based on Mitchell Hashimoto's vagrant-aws plugin, which can be found here: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws.

Author

Alex Young [email protected] Please get in touch, raise issues, make pull requests, if you're trying to use this and running into problems.