kitchen-vcair

A driver to allow Test Kitchen to consume vCloud Air resources to perform testing.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'kitchen-vcair'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install kitchen-vcair

Or even better, install it via ChefDK:

$ chef gem install kitchen-vcair

Usage

After installing the gem as described above, edit your .kitchen.yml file to set the driver to 'vcair' and supply your login credentials:

driver:
  name: vcair
  vcair_username: [email protected]
  vcair_password: MyS33kretPassword
  vcair_api_host: some-host.vchs.vmware.com
  vcair_org: M12345678-4321

Additionally, the following parameters are required:

  • vdc_id or vdc_name: The ID or name of the vDC in which to create your vApp/VM.
  • catalog_id or catalog_name: The ID or name of the catalog that contains your image/template.
  • image_id or image_name: The ID or name of the image you wish to use to create your VM.
  • network_id or network_name: The ID or name of the network to which to attach to your VM.

There are a number of optional parameters you can configure as well:

  • cpus: The number of vCPUs to configure for your VM. Default: 1
  • memory: The amount of RAM, in MB, to configure for your VM. Default: 1024
  • vcair_api_path: The URI path for the compute API. This needs to be set when using vCloud Air OnDemand. Default: /api
  • vm_password: The password to set via VM customization for the root/administrator user.
    • Be sure to set the same password in your transport section, too!
    • NOTE: see the known issues section below regarding Windows and passwords.

All of the above settings can be set globally (in the top-level driver section), or can be set individually for each platform. For example, you may wish to set your vDC and network globally, but set your catalog and image for each individual platform, and increase the vCPUs/RAM assigned to your windows node:

driver:
  name: vcair
  vcair_username: [email protected]
  vcair_password: MyS33kretPassword
  vcair_api_host: some-host.vchs.vmware.com
  vcair_org: M12345678-4321
  vdc_name: MyCompany VDC 1
  network_name: vdc1-default-routed

platforms:
  - name: centos
    driver:
      catalog_name: Public Catalog
      image_name: CentOS64-64BIT
  - name: windows
    driver:
      catalog_name: Public Catalog
      image_name: W2K12-STD-R2-64BIT
      cpus: 2
      memory: 4096

vCloud Air Subscription vs. OnDemand

kitchen-vcair works as-is with vCloud Air Subscription. In vCloud Air OnDemand, the API path is different. To use this plugin with vCloud Air OnDemand, you will need to set the vcair_api_path configuration parameter to /api/compute/api:

driver:
  vcair_api_path: /api/compute/api

Also, in our testing, we found many of the VMware-provided images are missing core configurations, such as properly-configured DNS resolvers. We strongly recommend building your own images off the VMware-provided images with proper configurations.

Known Issues and Workarounds

SSH Authentication - passwords vs. public-key

vCloud Air does not natively support deploying SSH keys to new VMs like other cloud providers. Therefore, many of the images in the vCloud Air public catalog only support password authentication.

Setting your own password

Through VM customization, vCloud Air allows you to specify a password that should be set for the root account. You can use the vm_password config parameter to specify that password:

driver:
  vm_password: mysupersecretpassword

... and then tell the transport to use that same password:

transport:
  password: mysupersecretpassword

Using the pre-generated password by vCloud Air

This is not supported. Unfortunately, a bug in Fog prevents us from retrieving that password, and a issue/PR will be logged to address this.

WinRM Authentication

Setup

Many of the images in the vCloud Air public catalog do not have WinRM enabled. You will need to provide a customization script to enable WinRM. An example can be found in the examples/ directory in this repo. Note that multiple reboots are required for the VM to become ready for Test Kitchen to use, so the time required for a Windows VM to be ready is fairly long.

A potential workaround to this would be to create your own VM with WinRM enabled and configured properly and publish it in your own catalog.

Setting your own password

The same customization function that works for Linux does not appear to work for Windows in vCloud Air. Additionally, Windows does not appear to honor the customization setting that disables the forced password change on first login.

Therefore, a customization script will need to be used to set your Administrator password. See the examples/ directory for a sample customization script that enables WinRM and sets the Administrator password.

NAT and Public IP Support

Unlike other cloud providers, vCloud Air does not treat public IPs as objects that can be associated with VMs. Instead, those IPs are associated with network objects called "gateways" which then require NAT and firewall rules to be created. The Fog library does not support the creation of those objects.

Therefore, only routed networks are supported, and it is required that Test Kitchen be executed on a network within vCloud Air that has access to the destination network on which your test VMs will be deployed.

License and Authors

Author:: Chef Partner Engineering ([email protected])

Copyright:: Copyright (c) 2015 Chef Software, Inc.

License:: Apache License, Version 2.0

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Contributing

We'd love to hear from you if this doesn't perform in the manner you expect. Please log a GitHub issue, or even better, submit a Pull Request with a fix!

  1. Fork it ( https://github.com/chef-partners/kitchen-vcair/fork )
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create a new Pull Request