HashiCorp Terraform is not currently available on the Photon OS repository. If you would like to install Terraform on a PhotonOS appliance you can use the script below. Note: The versions for Go and Terraform that I have included are current at the time of writing. Thanks to my colleague Ryan Johnson who shared this method with me some time ago for another project. #!/usr/bin/env bash # Versions GO_VERSION="1.21.4" TERRAFORM_VERSION="1.6.3" # Arch if [[ $(uname -m) == "x86_64" ]]; then LINUX_ARCH="amd64" elif [[ $(uname -m) == "aarch64" ]]; then LINUX_ARCH="arm64" fi # Directory if ..read more

I have been working a lot with Terraform lately and in particular the Terraform Provider For VMware Cloud Foundation. As I covered previously, the provider is something that is in development but is available to be tested and used in your VMware Cloud Foundation instances. I spent this week at VMware Explore in Barcelona and have been talking with our customers about their automation journey and what tools they are using for configuration management. Terraform came up in almost all conversations and the topic of Terraform modules specifically. Terraform modules are basically a set of standard ..read more

As part of my series on deploying and managing VMware Cloud Foundation using Terraform, this post will focus on deploying the VMware Cloud Foundation Cloud Builder appliance using the vSphere Terraform provider. I’ve used this provider in the past to deploy the NSX Manager appliance. Check out the other posts on Terraform with VMware Cloud Foundation here: VMware Cloud Foundation Terraform Provider: Introduction VMware Cloud Foundation Terraform Provider: Create a New VCF Instance Deploy Cloud Builder with the vSphere Terraform Provider As before, you first need to define your pr ..read more

Following on from my VMware Cloud Foundation Terraform Provider introduction post here I wanted to start by using it to create a new VCF instance (or perform a VCF bring-up). As of writing this post I am using version 0.5.0 of the provider. First off we need to define some variables to be used in our plan. Here is a copy of the variables.tf I am using. For reference, I am using the default values in the VCF Planning & Preparation Workbook for my configuration. Note “sensitive = true” on password and licence key variable to stop them from showing up on the console and in logs. variable "cl ..read more

HashiCorp Terraform has become an industry standard, infrastructure-as-code & desired-state configuration tool for managing on-premises and cloud-based entities. If you are not familiar with Terraform, I’ve covered some early general learnings on Terraform in some posts here & here. The internal engineering team are working on a Terraform provider for VCF, so I decided to give it a spin to review its capabilities & test drive it in the lab. First off what VCF operations is the Provider capable of supporting today: Deploying a new VCF instance (bring-up) Commissioning hosts Creatin ..read more

Once i got my head around the basics of Terraform I wanted to play with the vSphere provider to see what its was capable of. A basic use case that everyone needs is to deploy a VM. So my first use case is to deploy a VM from an OVA. The vSphere provider documentation for deploying an OVA uses William Lam’s nested ESXi OVA as an example. This is a great example of how to use the provider but seeing as I plan to play with the NSX-T provider also, I decided to use NSX-T Manager OVA as my source to deploy. So first thing to do is setup your provider. Every provider in the Terraform registry has a ..read more

Playing with Terraform has been on my To-Do list for a while now (it’s a long list ). Over the past couple of weeks i’ve been spending time in my homelab getting familiar with it and figured i’d create a blog series that may help others. So where do you start? There are lots of resources on the web to get started. From blogs to Pluralsight courses. The Terraform documentation & provider documentation in the Terraform Registry is also very good and usually has what you need. For my setup i use Visual Studio Code. I flip between my mac & a windows jump vm in my homelab, and VSC works se ..read more