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n3o
Contributor
Contributor
‎07-24-2020 11:32 AM

Automation for large scale VM deployments

Hello all:

I am making this post as I need some guidance, I am currently in an environment where there are say ~20 hosts and ~500 VMs. For various reasons we are going to be ramping up. We are building out many additional hosts and possibly a 100 new VMs of the same specs, can be from the same base image.

My goal is to master a deployment tool (preferably something universal) to deploy hundreds of VMware guest machines off a golden standard image or template. I am fairly ok with and love Powershell and PowerCLI. I am familiar with Microsoft SCCM OSD task sequences to deploy a single VM at a time as well as the basic VMware methods using a template and simple customization. However my lnowledge is still limited to using one liner PowerCLI commands to build each machine.

​I need some "visionary" guidance, should I look to VRA, Ansible, Packer or what combination would you suggest. I want to learn a set of universal tools that will enable me, when faced with a request to provision 100 machines, to do a couple of days of work planning, writing up text files (autoattend, yaml, or whatever) and then send forth the commands, to build out those VMs with customized IPs, hostnames, based on a specific template/ISO or image, have them join a doman etc. And walk away and grab a coffee, come back to my "desk" and watch them deploy.

I know I will have to invest time and effort into learning it, but I just want to know what to learn?

​

​Much appreciated.

​

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evil242
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎12-06-2022 10:26 AM

Apologies I don't have an answer, but want to watch this topic.  We have been using vRA for a while.  But recently management decided to migrate to the Cloud SaaS version of vRA.  Downside of the migration is that Cloud SaaS requires exposure of ESXi hosts:[443,902] to end users that would normally route all traffic through on-prem appliance. 

vRA has been great in that it has many integrations with things such as Infoblox DDI for automatic network configuration.  Integration with NSX.  Etc. 

But things that seem to be of issue is that there appears to be no direct integration with SCCM nor RH Satellite Server.  I'm hoping VMware or 3rd party comes out with something.  But may have to develop myself.

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