Over the past three years, my Puppet for vSphere Admins series has meandered through a number of topics, mostly involved on the Puppet side and somewhat light on the vSphere side. That changed a bit with my article Make the Puppet vRealize Automation plugin work with vRealize Orchestrator, describing how to use the plugin’s built-in workflows to perform some actions on your VMs. However, you had to invoke the workflows one by one, and they only worked on existing VMs. That is not good enough for automation! Today, we will start to look at how to integrate the Puppet Enterprise plugin into other workflows to provide end-to-end lifecycle management for your VMs.
What is the lifecycle of a VM? This can vary quite a bit, so the lifecycle we will work with today is made to be generic enough for everyone to use, but flexible enough that everyone can expand on it. It consists of:
- Provisioning
- Updating ancillary systems prior to VM creation (IPAM, DNS, etc)
- Deploying a Virtual Machine
- Installing Puppet Enterprise on the VM
- Using Puppet Enterprise to provision services on and configure the VM
- Add the new VM to a vCenter tag-based backup system
- Decommission
- Delete the VM (removes from backups)
- Purge the record from PE
- Update ancillary systems after VM removal (IPAM, DNS, etc)
rnelson0 