I’m pretty excited about this post! I’ve been building up Puppet for vSphere Admins for a few years now but the final integration aspects between Puppet and vSphere/vCenter were always a little clunky and difficult to maintain without specific dedication to those integration components. Thanks to Puppet and VMware, that’s changed now.
Puppet announced version 2.0 of their Puppet Plugin for vRealize Automation this week. There’s a nice video attached, but there’s one problem – it’s centered on vRealize Automation (vRA) and I am working with vRealize Orchestrator (vRO)! vRO is included with all licenses of vCenter, whereas vRA is a separate product that costs extra, and even though vRA requires a vRO engine to perform a lot of its work, it abstracts a lot of the configuration and implementation details away that vRO-only users need to care about. This means that much of the vRA documentation and guides you find, for the Puppet plugin or otherwise, are always missing some of the important details needed to implement the same functionality – and sometimes won’t work at all if it relies on vRA functionality not available to us.
Don’t worry, though, the Puppet plugin DOES work with vRO! We’ll look at a few workflows to install, run, and remove puppet from nodes and then discuss how we can use them within larger customized workflows. You must already have an installed vRealize Orchestrator 7.x instance configured to talk to your vCenter instance. I’m using vRO 7.0.0 with vCenter 6.0. If you’re using a newer version, some of the dialogs I show may look a little different. If you’re still on vRO 6.x, the configuration will look a LOT different (you may have to do some research to find the equivalent functionality) but the workflow examples should be accurate.
Puppet provides a User Guide for use with a reference implementation. I’ll be mostly repeating Part 2 when installing and configuring, but reality tends to diverge from reference so we’ll explore some non-reference details as well.
rnelson0 