IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions vrealize Automation 7.2 Chef Integration

Transcription

1 IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions vrealize Automation 7.2 Chef Integration Date: Version: 1.0 ã Copyright IBM Corporation 2016 Page 1 of 8

2 Table of Contents 1 Introduction Chef Server integration with VRA Key Benefits Summary of Changes Design Overview VRA, Chef and Software Defined Infrastructure Workflow Deployment... 6 ã Copyright IBM Corporation 2016 Page 2 of 8

3 1 Introduction 1.1 Chef Server integration with VRA 7.2 This document details the design of the Chef Server integration with vrealize Automation(VRA) 7.2. This design is to serve as a baseline architecture that provides the foundation for other internal or vendor specific components to be added into the orchestration and automation platform, as required by specific use cases. This document details how applications and services can be integrated with VRA 7.2 and installations are initiated. It does not cover the functionality of OpsCode Chef Server, the details of which are available in their website. 1.2 Key Benefits Integration into configuration management tooling Integration into automation engines, allowing users the ability to do end to end provisioning 1.3 Summary of Changes This section records the history of significant changes to this document. Version Date Author Description of Change IBM Cloud Initial release ã Copyright IBM Corporation 2016 Page 3 of 8

4 2 Design 2.1 Overview This document gives an overview of the integration of Chef server and vrealize Automation(VRA) 7.2 using VRA s Blueprints and Software Components. A Blueprint specifies the workflow used to provision a machine and includes information such as CPU, memory, and storage whereas Software Components define middleware and application deployment components, specifying exactly how they are installed, configured, and uninstalled on machines. The vrealize Automation and Chef integration allows customers to execute Chef recipes to deploy applications at the time of provisioning of a VM. Chef lets you define your infrastructure as code and have that code manage systems consistently and quickly as they scale. Integrating Chef server with vrealize Automation lets you harness the power of both these powerful systems and quickly automate your application/infrastructure deployment. In some cases, customers already have a Chef repo with all the Chef cookbooks that they currently use to automate their application deployment on either on-prem or on other cloud providers. This integration allows them to continue using the same Chef cookbooks in the VMware deployments as well without having to duplicate the efforts by writing separate deployment scripts. The following architectural overview shows how Cloud Admins use VRA tooling to generate the blueprints an End User can execute through VRA to deploy virtualized servers in their VMware environment. The chef agents embedded in these VMs then pull the recipe they are to run from the Chef tooling. ã Copyright IBM Corporation 2016 Page 4 of 8

5 The following diagram provides a more detailed illustration of the interaction between the different key components in this integration. The table describes the different components that make up the integration Component Catalog Blueprint Software Component Chef Server Repository Server Chef client/agent Description The service catalog provides a common interface for consumers of IT services to use to request and manage the services and resources they need. A blueprint specifies the workflow used to provision a machine and includes information such as CPU, memory, storage and the locations of required disk images or virtualization platform objects. A Software Component defines middleware and application deployment components, specifying exactly how they are installed, configured, and uninstalled on machines The Chef server acts as a hub for configuration data and uses cookbooks as building blocks to describe your infrastructure. The Chef server also stores information about the systems you manage. It communicates with nodes running the Chef client to manage your entire application infrastructure. This is where all the media and scripts required by the Chef server and the Chef agents are hosted, in order to deploy and configure applications. A chef-client is an agent that runs locally on every node that is under management by Chef. When a chef-client is run, it will perform all of the steps that are required to bring the node into the expected state. ã Copyright IBM Corporation 2016 Page 5 of 8

6 2.2 VRA, Chef and Software Defined Infrastructure The vrealize Automation s Software components and Chef tools lets you realize the power of Software Defined Infrastructure(SDI) that helps transform a static IT infrastructure into a dynamic resource, workload and data-aware environment. Application workloads are serviced automatically by the most appropriate resource running locally, in the cloud, or in a hybrid cloud environment. With SDI, you can securely integrate mobile services, use data efficiently for analytics services, and manage in an always-on world for service predictability. At a macro level, SDI differs from traditional IT infrastructure in that it is designed to leverage software innovation over hardware and automation over manual operations. Rather than make traditional all-inone products or product suites, SDI uses cross-technology programmability to create highly customized solutions that integrate various technologies and products. The vrealize Automation and Chef automation can be leveraged together to examine the architectural decisions you should be considering to get the most out of Software Defined Infrastructure. Chef s motto of turning infrastructure into code fits nicely with what VMware aims to deliver through its promise of software-defined storage and software-definednetworking which shares the goals of automating administration and helping IT professionals address application requirements more effectively. SDI teams often use DevOps tools once used primarily for server and application configuration tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt to configure networking and storage elements. This has improved manageability and automation, and increased the scale a single infrastructure administrator can manage. The ratio of administrator to possible devices managed now has increased from one administrator to tens or hundreds of devices, to one administrator to thousands of devices. 2.3 Workflow The flow of events is that when the blueprint runs, it sets up a number of variables which define how the system should respond, what software is going to be configured, how this will be achieved and what parameters are to be presented to the provisioning user to allow run time configuration of the applications. A key component of the software components are the commands that are to be run on the deployed instance, the software components define the commands to run and vrealize Automation passes these down to the VMware guest agent that is installed into the image. The guest agent then runs the commands substituting in the variables that are required to action the various steps that are needed to configure the instances and deploy the software configurations. Once the scripts have configured the Chef client on the deployed instance, the client is run defining a Role that will be applied and passing any parameters that are required to customize the application being deployed. A Role is a way to define certain patterns and processes that exist across nodes in an organization as belonging to a single job function. Each role consists of zero or more attributes and a runlist. Each node can have zero or more roles assigned to it. When a Role is run against a node, the configuration details of that node are compared against the attributes of the role, and then the contents of that role s run-list are applied to the node s configuration details. When a chef-client runs, it merges its own attributes and run-lists with those contained within each assigned role that will allow it to install and configure the desired applications. 2.4 Deployment Deployment of the Chef server can be done in 2 ways: 1. Using a pre created automation pattern in VRA: This automation pattern should be capable of deploying a Virtual Machine, install a Chef Server, create an organization, admin users and the required certificates and keys for the Chef clients to be able to communicate with the Chef Server. 2. Install the Chef Server manually: The VRA admin should install and configure the Chef server manually by following the instructions from OpsCode site. The suggested deployment model for the Chef Server is to deploy one server for every vcenter deployment, especially if the vcenters are spread across global data centers. This strategy distributes the ã Copyright IBM Corporation 2016 Page 6 of 8

7 load across multiple Chef Servers to serve the increasing number of Chef clients. This also helps reduce the bandwidth required to download installation packages from the Chef server in certain cases. The following are the 2 deployment types: Global deployment: This is the deployment model in which a single global Chef server is shared across different data centers in the customer environment. This deployment model makes it easy for maintenance of Chef cookbooks, roles and data bags since you will need to make changes in simply one Chef server as opposed to multiple ones as in the case of Multi data center deployment model. Multi data center deployment: This is a deployment model in which every data center has its own Chef server and each node/chef client in a data center only talks to the Chef server in their respective data centers. A single change in the cookbooks or roles need to be propagated to each and every Chef Server in the customer deployment. However, this can be simplified with the use of source control tools like Git. This strategy guarantees that in case of a failure of a Chef server in one data center, the rest of the chef clients in other data centers are not affected. This deployment model also reduces the bandwidth and latency while downloading packages that are hosted on the Chef server and are required to install a particular application. ã Copyright IBM Corporation 2016 Page 7 of 8

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