Puppet 101 Basic installation for master and agent machines on Ubuntu with VMware Workstation

Transcription

1 Puppet 101 Basic installation for master and agent machines on Ubuntu with VMware Workstation You don t have to go far to hear the word Puppet these days. Configuration management isn t just a new trend that is hitting IT environments. It is a methodology for stateful, repeatable, DevOps style management of your infrastructure. For the VMware folks, this is now a part of the vcloud ecosystem in a way because of the integration of Puppet into the vcloud Hybrid Service (vchs) that was recently announced. Most Common Question Nearly every single day I hear from someone Puppet looks cool, I need to figure out how to use it. This inevitably leads to the most common question: How do I get started with Puppet? Before you say I don t use Linux, don t worry. What I want to do here is to show you the simplest step-by-step way to install Ubuntu on a server and a client with Puppet server and a Puppet agent configuration. Let me be clear that our Puppet installation here isn t difficult, but it does require some time and you have to be sure to follow the process, albeit concise, without missing any steps. Two Flavors of Puppet to Start Off With There are two distinct types of Puppet deployment: Enterprise or Open Source. This leads to the next challenge for many, which is finding out which is the appropriate one to run with. Hint: They are both great to start with With the Puppet Enterprise environment ( you can deploy easily using the web dashboard, manage your environment with the full backing of the Puppet team. It has all sorts of reasons to make it an amazing fit for you. That being said, it is also a commercial product which comes with a license and support cost. This is not a problem for your real production deployment where you need/want that support, but we just want to kick the tires on it first to figure out how to use it. Enter Puppet Open Source ( which lets us use the fully open source version of the product, and the price tag is a grand total of zero dollars. Well, capital expense is zero, but there are some requirements for running this which include comfort with the Linux environment. Basic Installation For Brand New Users I m going to use my VMware Workstation environment to start things off. I also have the Ubuntu 64- bit Server LTS (Long Term Support) ISO file which I ll use for deploying. Before we get started, you need to go here to download that:

2 Now that you have your requirements, let s install our two virtual guests which will be using DHCP (easiest deployment to get us started quickly) using the names puppetserver and puppetclient for our virtual machines. We will use the VMware Workstation easy install wizard to quickly deploy the guest OS. Install Our First VM (puppetserver) Using or VMware Workstation, we will create a new virtual guest by choosing File New Virtual Machine and using the steps below:

3 At this point you have to choose your username that will be your login account to the Ubuntu console. Type in your full name, a user name and a password:

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10 Install Our Second VM (puppetclient) Rather than repeating all of our screen shots, just repeat the process as you did above, except you need to select puppetclient as the VM name in step 5.

11 Now that you have deployed your second machine, you can see the two guests in your VMware Workstation window. Yay! We have our two guest machines ready to start our Puppet deployment.

12 Configuring our Puppet Master (puppetserver) Log in to the console using the credentials you defined during the setup wizard. We will launch all commands using the sudo command which will elevate our privileges to launch each action. The first time you use sudo, you will be prompted for your credentials. Further sudo commands in the same session will use those cached credentials. Update the apt repositories with the apt-get utility sudo apt-get update Change the host name using sed (Linux stream editor) sudo sed -i s/ubuntu/puppetserver/g /etc/hostname Set our IP up for the network interface eth0 using nano (a fairly simple Linux editor). Once we edit the info with the format below, using your own IP information, we just type Ctrl-X, then type Y followed by pressing Enter to confirm the file name, save and exit. While I don t personally use nano, the general usage is simple for those just getting started. sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces Add a record to the Hosts file for our server and our client (use your own IP addresses of course) sudo nano /etc/hosts

13 Install Puppet sudo apt-get install -y puppetmaster Stop the puppetmaster service sudo service puppetmaster stop Remove the default certificate sudo rm -r /var/lib/puppet/ssl Reboot the server sudo reboot Log in to the console once the reboot is completed. We will do some tasks after our client is configured. That s it. No, really, that s the end of the server configuration. Next we configure our client machine Configuring our Puppet Agent (puppetclient) Now we log in to the console of our second guest which will become the agent managed machine. We will be performing the following steps: Update the apt repositories with the apt-get utility

14 sudo apt-get update Change the host name using sed (Linux stream editor) sudo sed -i s/ubuntu/puppetclient/g /etc/hostname Set our IP up for the network interface eth0 using nano (a fairly simple Linux editor). Once we edit the info with the format below, using your own IP information, we just type Ctrl-X, then type Y followed by pressing Enter to confirm the file name, save and exit. While I don t personally use nano, the general usage is simple for those just getting started. sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces Reboot to ensure the new IP and hostname take effect sudo reboot Log in to the console again Add a record to the Hosts file for our server and our client (use your own IP addresses of course) sudo nano /etc/hosts

15 Install Puppet sudo apt-get install -y puppet Add the puppetmaster server entry in the puppet.conf file. We will create an [agent] section and put an entry which says server = puppetmaster sudo nano /etc/puppet/puppet.conf Set the puppet agent to start automatically using sed sudo sed -i s/no/yes/g /etc/default/puppet

16 Restart the puppet agent sudo service puppet restart Now are client is fully configured. Let s go back to the puppetserver console and manage the puppet agent request which will have been created by restarting the services on the client. On the puppetserver console we list the pending certificates and then we sign the certificate with the requesting name attached. This is the sequence that we use: sudo puppet cert list sudo puppet cert sign agentname And now we have our Puppet server and Puppet client all ready to go!! We have lots of tasks we can do now, but we start with the basic step of creating our first manifest. Creating your site.pp file On your puppetserver you need to create your first manifest. With future articles we will do lots more than this, but the first step is to get your initial file started to test the running of the manifest against your new puppet client. sudo nano /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp Add the following content shown in the image and save the file

17 Next we can either wait for the manifest to run at the next interval which we won t do because we are impatient Log into the puppet client console and initiate the puppet agent by restarting the service sudo service puppet restart Now we will run the puppet agent to test the connection sudo puppet agent test Yay! It worked. Let s confirm the file has shown up as we defined it in our site.pp manifest:

18 So now we have successfully completed a few tasks: Installed our puppet server Installed a puppet client Connected the puppet client to the server Created a basic (very, very basic) manifest Run the manifest against our client This may not seem like a big accomplishment for some, but surprisingly there are many administrators who have little or no experience with using Linux systems, and the first few steps, although simple, can be daunting for some. In future posts we will take the next important steps of creating manifest modules, deploying the puppet client to a Microsoft Windows machine, and then getting into more detailed manifest configuration. Puppet Cheat Sheets We will use these for our next post as we start to build some basic manifests for testing out the various components. We can use these to help us dip our toes further into the water of Puppet automation. Puppet Labs Module Cheat Sheet Puppet Labs Core Types Cheat Sheet

19 So read those guides and we will be adding some more flavor to our little Puppet test environment very soon! I hope that this is a helpful guide to get people started on your journey with puppet vexpert 2013 Look who just joined the club!! I have one word to describe the feeling right now: Wow! I am humbled and thankful to VMware, John Troyer, Angelo Luciani and the whole community who have kindly added me to the vexpert list for This is truly an honour for me and I have to say a massive thank you to everyone who has helped me to be a part of this. It s about Community The amazing thing about community is that it transcends many things. Location, job title, experience level, age or any other factor don t come into play. The community of VMware User Groups, OpenStack users, vbrownbag attendees and of many of a growing list of community driven groups continue to be a massive part of what drives information sharing and peer-to-peer education. While I m a relative newbie to blogging within the last couple of years, the acceptance by the community has been incredible. For this reason I hope to encourage many more to join in, have your say and to share your stories.

20 Congratulations to all the new and renewed vexperts! You can go here ( and view the informal 2013 list and reach out to them with a congratulations. Most importantly, you as a reader can support these people and yourself by attending the events, reading the blogs and getting and staying active on Twitter to engage fully with the group. One year ago I learned of the vexpert elections but this year I put my name in the hat and if you haven t already been involved, then this will be the start of your campaign to be a part of the vexpert group for 2014! Let s Keep the Momentum This isn t the end where we celebrate and relax. This is the beginning. I can proudly say that by being lucky enough to be a part of a great community is something that I do everything I can to keep sharing what I m learning with my peers and to bring more and more people into a growing and exciting community. Thank you all for listening, for sharing, and for everything that you have done to inspire me, and the community, to go over and above wherever we can to help each other and to be a part of something great. Chapeau!

21 Toronto VMUG: May 23rd, 2013 Event Recap and Private Cloud Presentation It was a beautiful sunny morning in Toronto and a great day for a VMUG meeting! May 23rd brought the first VMUG meeting of the spring here and the audience showed that they were ready to show some community love today. There were two great vendors here for the session which were Tintri and Veeam, followed by yours truly with my presentation titled Private Cloud Going from Lab to Live. The audience was a great size, Angelo Luciani put together a great day for us and we also had Mike Preston ( in attendance so it was a great opportunity to chat and we had a great lunch afterwards. VMware Horizon Workspace with Mike Bujara Mike from VMware did a great preview of the VMware Horizon Workspace for us. The awesome part of it was that he did the connection tethered from an iphone which tells you the kind of flexibility that this great product suite gives you. I ve been lucky enough to lab the VMware Horizon suite and I can tell you that it is a phenomenal product. Licensing is another beast altogether, but the feature set that is offered with the latest iteration is pretty amazing and you will find that it is a great way to extend your corporate infrastructure to your staff through mobile devices, VPN remote deployments and maybe even full desktop replacement in the office. Pretty cool technology all around. Tintri Storage Presentation Tintri brought the thunder today. One of the first employees at Tintri, Rex flew in from California and he knew how to read the audience well. Right out of the gate the presentation went to real performance management techniques and the myths about IOPS and the effect on overall performance. We don t often get a chance to dive deep with presenters, so this was nice that the audience was able to get some great questions answered and I can safely say that we all learned some great information about storage, flash and I/O performance as a result. Veeam Tales from the Field: Don t let this happen to your VMs The Veeam team did another great job with a

22 presentation about the Veeam Backup and Replication suite and the other great Veeam tools such as Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots and Veeam Explorer for Exchange. Even more exciting are the new features that are coming out with V7.0 that is due out around the time of VMworld San Francisco so make sure that you will be very pleased with. Follow along with the announcements as they come out here: Demo time was in order and Mario from Veeam showed us a live session where he was able to restore Exchange objects, Active Directory objects and full servers using backup instances. All of which was done in a matter of minutes. The product performance speaks for itself really, but if you haven t had a chance to see it, you can view the v7 webinars or reach out to the team through the website by clicking on the banner to the right of the page. My Presentation on Private Cloud Going from Lab to Live The goal of this presentation is to summarize various cloud infrastructure deployments, and to concentrate on starting with a cloud labs with the goal of being able to move towards new processes and developing a cloudy way to manage your virtualization environment. The slide deck alone doesn t quite convey the full impact unfortunately, but I hope that the general theme comes through. I hope to put my presentation together with a full audio overlay to fully deliver the content as it was meant. If you have any questions or comments on the presentation or content, you can find me on or to eric at discoposse dot com. Thank you very much to Angelo Luciani, Mike Preston, the VMUG community and to everyone who helps to bring these events together. VMware Hybrid Cloud Launch Day Why this is important, and What is New So today is a big announcement day for VMware. Not a total surprise of course, because they have teased this offering for a while, and they have actually had the system in customer beta testing for a while. I know, because I was one of the lucky ones who was able to get a first crack at the system If you ve read what I wrote back then (Article: vcloud Hybrid Cloud) you have probably had some interest in what I was after too; the opportunity to add VMware supported services for on-demand cloud usage to ease the transition to cloud infrastructure. Ready for Prime Time Finally Admittedly, I found the original beta to be a little light duty. I have had two servers running in that environment with a variety of configurations. I even have my Puppet environment hosted there now as a proof of concept deployment for some projects I have that are brewing up.

23 Today is a different day because of that testing and the continuous feedback that has poured back into the VMware Hybrid Cloud group. They have had their hands full I m sure with support calls, and the growing reliability of the service was evident. But today, as I ve said, is a different day. Today, this is a real system. What is Next for the vcloud Hybrid Cloud One word: Growth. This is the beginning of something great in that it adds competitiveness to the market, and it allows for a logical first step for many organizations to use public cloud infrastructure for their production workloads. What was interesting is how many conversations, some of them very animated, were sparked up over the announcement. The Twitterverse was alight with speculation that this is meant to be an AWS killer, or an OpenStack killer. In my opinion, it is neither of those but it is as important as the ios, BlackBerry, Android OS battle in the mobile space. Dedicated or Virtual Private (multi-tenant) The cool feature of this is is that there are two service offerings. The Dedicated vcloud environment is a physically isolated environment which you retain complete control over and can easily link to your on-premise vcloud using the vcloud Connector. If you want to use the on-demand capability of the Virtual Private cloud infrastructure, those resources are also available which are logically isolated from other environments using the well tested vcloud Networking and Security suite. image courtesy of VMware (click for source page) Partnerships The Real Power of the Cloud It doesn t have to go much further than the announcement that the amazing automation engine Puppet is fully integrated into the environment, so you can dive right in with this popular configuration management tool and even if you aren t already dipping your toes into the Puppet waters, I can tell you that the water is beautiful and it is a quick transition.

24 Even if you don t interact with it, the truth is that Puppet is now part of the fabric of the vcloud ecosystem which is the result of some amazing work by the Cloud Services Team and the symbolic investment that VMware has made with Puppet Labs. Some have proposed that this is a shot across the bow of partner cloud providers, but I think that this is really an opportunity to widen the net and gain a strong adoption of the vcloud products in public, private and hybrid deployments across the board. Comfort Food in the Datacenter We like this announcement in the same way that we smell our grandma s apple pie cooking, or the taste of your favorite curl up on the couch meal. This is about comfort. We know that this technology is working well for us today in our on-premise deployments, so this is the chance to confidently take the next step and take advantage of a growing wave in technology. I really see this as a way to take those who we traditionally see in the laggards category, and move them much closer to the peak of the technology adoption curve. Bravo VMware, and I can t wait to watch this come together. Production general availability in North America datacenters is scheduled for Q and early access will be available in June. View the VMware vcloud Hybrid site here: And most importantly, here is the pricing info: Here is the announcement from Puppet Labs: blog&utm_medium=socnet&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=vchs_interview_blog