vagrant-vcloud-box

Ubuntu Desktop box with preinstalled Vagrant and vagrant-vcloud plugin to have a working environment to connect to vCloud.

What's inside the box?

• Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop (with german keyboard and timezone)
• Vagrant 1.7.2
• vagrant-vcloud 0.4.4 Plugin to work with Vagrant in vCloud, special pre-release
• rdesktop for the vagrant rdp command
• rsync to use the synced folder feature of Vagrant to transfer files into the vCloud guests.
• git to clone GitHub repos
• Google Chrome to connect to the vCloud Director web interface
• nodejs + npm to work with grunt-jenkins to save/restore Jenkins servers that are also built with vagrant up

Preparation

SSH Agent

SSH agent forwarding is enabled to allow chaining SSH connections using ssh-agent. This is useful if you want to clone a private git repository from inside the box.

There is a good tutorial on using ssh-agent at http://mah.everybody.org/docs/ssh

Warning: Never connect to an untrusted host via ssh while ssh-agent is enabled.

Create a user vagrant in your vCloud org

It is strongly recommended to use another user than your normal Windows user account name to log into your vCloud from vagrant. Just to avoid entering your Windows password in this Vagrantfile.

So log into your vCloud org, go to Administration tab, then Users. Create an user vagrant there with local administration rights and a password.

Global Vagrantfile

Your connection data into your vCloud org or other global Vagrant settings could be placed in the following file:

resources/Vagrantfile

This file will be copied into ~/.vagrant.d/Vagrantfile in the guest VM so that the vagrant-vcloud plugin can connect to your vCloud org from inside this VM. Enter the user name and password of the newly created user of your vCloud org.

This file may look like this one:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|

  if Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-vcloud")
    # vCloud Director provider settings
    config.vm.provider :vcloud do |vcloud|
      vcloud.hostname = "https://yourvcloudhost.fqdn"
      vcloud.username = "vagrant"
      vcloud.password = "XXXXXXX"

      vcloud.org_name = "XX"
      vcloud.vdc_name = "XX-ORG"

      vcloud.catalog_name = "Vagrant"

      vcloud.vdc_network_name = "XX-INTERNAL"

      vcloud.vdc_edge_gateway = "XX-EDGE"
      vcloud.vdc_edge_gateway_ip = "10.100.XX.X"
    end
  end

end

Retrieve vCloud settings for global Vagrantfile

If you don't know all these values, don't worry. Just create the box and use the script /vagrant/scripts/retrieve-vcloud-settings.sh from inside the VM with your username and vCloud org name. The scripts tries to retrieve all these values for you.

$ ./retrieve-vagrant-vcloud-settings.sh --username stefan.scherer --orgname ss --hostname mycloud.mydomain
http: password for stefan.scherer@[email protected]:
Put this lines to your global ~/.vagrant.d/Vagrantfile

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  if Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-vcloud")
    vcloud.hostname            = "https://mycloud.mydomain"
    vcloud.username            = "stefan.scherer"
    vcloud.password            = ENV['VCLOUD_PASSWORD'] || ""
    vcloud.org_name            = "XX"
    vcloud.vdc_name            = "XX-VDC"
    # vcloud.catalog_name        = "GLOBAL-CATALOG"
    # vcloud.ip_subnet           = "172.16.32.1/255.255.255.0"]
    # vcloud.ip_dns              = ["4.4.4.4", "8.8.8.8"]
    vcloud.vdc_network_name    = "XX-INTERNAL"
    vcloud.vdc_edge_gateway    = "XX-EDGE"
    vcloud.vdc_edge_gateway_ip = "1.2.3.4"
  end
end

This script can also be used independently, but the script needs some other tools to work:

• httpie - a nice command line http client
• xml2json - a XML 2 JSON parser
• jq - the swiss army knife parsing JSON

Installation

Just create the box

vagrant up

While provisioning the desktop restarts once to finalize the Gnome Settings. As a last step some Serverspec tests run to check if provisioning worked correctly.

Then open a terminal and you may clone GitHub repos with Vagrantfiles ready to rumble to your vCloud.

Build a Virtual Appliance (OVA)

Manually on OS X

To build a Virtual Appliance of this Vagrant box, use the script buildova.sh which builds the box, installs all software and tests the box with vagrant-serverspec.

See the test/ directory with all the serverspec tests that will run before building the OVA.

./buildova.sh

If everything works fine and the tests run sucessfully, an OVA file vagrant-vcloud-box.ova is written into the current directory.

Automated with Jenkins on Windows

The OVA for VMware is created automatically with a Jenkins job in my basebox-slave Jenkins build pipeline. The script for the build will be called with

bin\build.bat vagrant-vcloud-box_vmware

Jenkins also checks the output of the Serverspec tests and uploads the OVA to a intranet server.

Sample vCloud walktrough

Clone the following small sample repo to build a vCloud vApp with two Ubuntu boxes.

git clone https://github.com/StefanScherer/vcloud-scenarios.git
cd vcloud-scenarios
cd precise32
vagrant up --provider=vcloud

Build this box in vCloud

You may also build this box inside your vCloud.

For the serverspec test, be sure to remove old entries in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. Otherwise all tests will fail.

Now build the vApp in your vCloud with

vagrant up --provider=vcloud

It also forwards the RDP port, the xrdp server is installed, but there is still work to make it work correctly.