Automated VM deployment

[vJoe3970]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is the right discussion thread for this post so please forgive me

and let me know if it should be posted somewhere else.

My team and I are in the early stages of a vSphere 5.1 deployment.  We haven't had

the opportunity to use Orchestrator yet but we've been dealing with a particular challenge

that I'm hoping someone could help us find the answer for.

We have other departments who are continually requesting deployment of new VM's for

testing/training purposes.  The manual process involved with this is placing more of a

burden on my team and I've been wondering if there is a way to automate this process?

The goal would be to fully-automate, as much as possible, the deployment of VM's (W2K8),

have them available for a set period of time and then have them removed from inventory or

deleted from disk automatically.  Ideally, we'd like to have these VM's current on patches

at the time of deployment as well.

Is this something we could achive with Orchestrator or is there another/better way to

do this?

Any information, thoughts/ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Boloo]

Wy you don´t use a template?

Using templates and Customization specifications manager, can do a deploy of machines in minutes.

[Burke-]

Yes, this is something you can achieve with Orchestrator (mostly):

http://www.vcoteam.info/learn-vco/create-a-simple-vco-self-service-vm-provisioning-portal-part-1.htm...

http://www.vcoteam.info/learn-vco/create-a-simple-vco-self-service-vm-provisioning-portal-part-2.htm...

http://www.vcoteam.info/learn-vco/create-a-simple-vco-self-service-vm-provisioning-portal-part-3.htm...

The articles listed above are about a year old now, but still applly to vCO 5.x. The series focuses on a very simple use case of self service request portal for a small number of users. It addresses the automated provisioning of VMs in a consistent manner, but additional work would be required to provide a better front-end (IE: Wavemaker perhaps??) and does not, in its current form, address the automated decommissioning of vms. This can be done and vCO could be used to build out a full system, but it will be a bit of work. The series above is great for small shops with limited budget but rich with motivated tech-minded admins as it allows you to put features into place as needed and as you gain the expertise without the cost of additional licensing of products and tools. If the budget allows, a better solution would be to use vCloud Director (vCD) to create base environments that can quickly be deployed. This would allow you to step beyond just providing single VM request system that is possible with vCenter's VM Templates and Customization Specifications.

In regards to patching the VMs, VMware Configuration Manager could be used to help with this task. There is even a vCO Workflow package created by the vCM Team to help automate the process from a workflow.

Message was edited by: Burke- to update comment about patching..

[vJoe3970]

Yes, I was assuming we'd have to deploy from templates.

Is this what you are describing?

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-4-esx-vcenter/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.vsphere.vmadmin.doc_41/vsp_...

If so, how could we schedule this process and also schedule deletion of VM's after a certain period of time?

[vJoe3970]

Ok, these instructions would be more appropriate based on our current vSphere 5.1 implementation

wouldn't they?

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc_50%2FGUID-75232...

[Boloo]

All the two things at time

Creating a template and have all the updates.

Creating a customization to deploy more quick

Regards,

[vJoe3970]

Thank you Burke, this is great information!

I believe our budget would allow for vCloud Director so I'll read up on it's capabilities/features.

Having a self-service based solution would certainly help but hopefully VCD will be what we

are looking for.

Hopefully we can find the right tool for the right job to help us automate our provisioning and

de-provisioning processes as much as possible.

[Lando888]

Thanks Boloo that works for me