Nimbus deployment tool
Deneric tool to deploy a nimbus testbed that relies on as few as possible environment variables.
Rationale
But we already have such tool, and it's called nimbus... The
rationale behind writing a wrapping tool is that nimbus is a very
generic tool and has many options. Finding all the relevant options,
and writing the configuration file, for my use case is actually pretty
heavy. Documenting this process is similar to writing a code that does
that. So why not writing something clean that others could refer to
and use.
Expected outcome
A file in ~/bin that I can execute. It would take a configuration
file (either one specified on the command line or a default one), and
then deploy a lab consisting of:
- 1 ESX
- 1 vCenter
- 1 worker (to allocate static IPs)
Input
Input will be provided as environment variables, with a NP_ prefix
standing for "Nimbus Platform".
-
NP_NAME: A platform name that will be used to identify the platform instance deployed by the tool (so that one can deploy several labs). The name is mandatory. -
NP_ESX_BUILD,NP_VCENTER_BUILD: build numbers identifying the version of the ESX and vCenter to be deployed. Sane defaults should be provided. -
NP_CPU,NP_RAM,NP_DISK: Amount of resources to allocate for the ESX (in GB for RAM and DISK). Minimalist defaults should be provided.
Usage example
$ scp deploy-testbed.sh jtramiel@nimbus-gateway.eng.vmware.com:
$ ssh jtramiel@nimbus-gateway.eng.vmware.com
$ NP_NAME=lab0 ./deploy-testbed.sh
Then we can check that our lab has been successfully deployed: https://devhub.eng.vmware.com/console/nimbus/testbeds