{"id":3082,"date":"2020-05-06T22:06:05","date_gmt":"2020-05-07T02:06:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chrisgrundemann.com\/?p=3082"},"modified":"2021-07-08T11:09:21","modified_gmt":"2021-07-08T15:09:21","slug":"vmware-embracing-terraform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chrisgrundemann.com\/index.php\/2020\/vmware-embracing-terraform\/","title":{"rendered":"VMware Embracing Terraform"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

I was a little surprised when I heard VMware’s Narayan Bharadwaj<\/a> mention Terraform during the opening session of Cloud Field Day 7<\/a>. In fact, what he said is that VMware is “embracing Terraform in a pretty big way<\/em><\/a>” as part of their focus on Infrastructure as Code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This struck me for two reasons. One, you wouldn’t be off-base to think of Terraform as a competitor to several VMware products. And two, because of the things that it makes possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VMware & Terraform?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

First things first, I had to check it out. Sure enough, there are actually several Terraform providers for VMware products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It looks like the oldest is the VMware vSphere Provider<\/a> (version 0.1.0 was published about 3 years ago):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The VMware vSphere provider gives Terraform the ability to work with VMware vSphere Products, notably vCenter Server<\/a> and ESXi<\/a>. This provider can be used to manage many aspects of a VMware vSphere environment, including virtual machines, standard and distributed networks, datastores, and more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Of course, since the #CFD7<\/a> presentation was all about VMware Cloud (VMC) on Amazon Web Services (AWS)<\/a>, the announcement I heard was focused on the more recent providers for, yes, VMC<\/a>, and for NSX-T<\/a> (which is an integral component of VMC).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s more, the “official” Automation Resource Digest for VMC<\/a> includes the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Infrastructure as Code (IaC):<\/strong> There are several IaC tools\/modules for VMware Cloud on AWS automation that have been developed by VMware and\/or the developer community. Recently, a new HashiCorp Terraform provider for VMware Cloud on AWS has been released that can be used to provision and manage SDDC. Customers can now use this provider with vSphere Terraform provider and NSX-T Terraform provider to automate their end-to-end use cases from network & security configuration to VM provisioning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I also found a couple other WMware\/Terraform providers; for vCloud Director<\/a> and vRealize Automation<\/a> \/ vRA7<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s a Terraform?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Hold up. Before I go any further, we need to address the question that is on at least a few of your minds… “What is this Terraform thing you keep talking about, and why should I care?<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Terraform<\/a> is the only open source infrastructure as code provisioning tool that is immutable, declarative, masterless, agentless, and idempotent. If you want to argue about that, or learn more about why it matters, I refer you to the expert, Yevgeniy Brikman<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For those who aren’t quite ready to dive into the deep end, here’s some basic info from Nico Vibert<\/a>‘s great blog post<\/a> (which includes examples of how to set up Terraform with VMware Cloud on AWS): Terraform is…<\/p>\n\n\n\n