Streamlining provisioning operations on VSphere with Saltstack and a vijava
In enterprise environments VMware vSphere is the most common virtualization choice. Hence when it comes to provisioning most rely on vm templates to accelerate and standardize the creation of new virtual machines. While templates work well for both Windows and Linux vms it still leaves a lot out and administrators may have additional work that has to be carried out manually (like configure networking, optionally move the vm in the right network/resource group, create application accounts, set up IIS, tomcat, java, etc, etc). True, most of this post-bootstrap setup can be taken care of with Puppet, Chef or, in my case, Saltstack , but what I wanted was a push-button vm provisioning that does all of the following automagically: create a new vm (only Linux vms are supported as of now) assign a pre-determined static ip address/name move vm into appropriate network configure it with Saltstack register the vm into out monitoring system (currently OpenNMS )