Terraform

I create a lot of virtual machines during the week to test deployments, or try to digg into problems of deployments. In the past I used Vmware Workstation, Oracle VirtualBox or MS HyperV on my desktops, but I also used Vmware ESX. I tried to use Vagrant and Packer to prepare images and distribute them, but wasn’t satisfied at all.

My last article showed how to build a server template with Packer .

Now we want to use this template to create some servers on VMware vSphere. DNS will be registered manually and all IP addresses will be defined as fixed in the config files.

The last months I built a lot of environments for tests with IBM Connections Componentpack, Rancher, plain Kubernetes, IBM Domino and some more. In former years, I deployed single virtual machines, cloned them and created snapshots to “easily” jump back in cases of errors. Then I found Packer , which helped me to automate the first virtual machines on my local notebook.

Now I use Packer to create templates for VMware vSphere, which then are deployed and multiplied with Terraform . Terraform needs some packages installed in the template, that it can provision virtual machines on vSphere.