VMware on Equinix Metal

This repo has Terraform plans to deploy a multi-node vSphere cluster with vSan enabled on Packet. Follow this simple instructions below and you shold be able to go from zero to vSphere in 30 to 60m.

Install Terraform

Terraform is just a single binary. Visit their download page, choose your operating system, make the binary executable, and move it into your path.

Here is an example for macOS:

curl -LO https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/0.12.18/terraform_0.12.18_darwin_amd64.zip 
unzip terraform_0.12.18_darwin_amd64.zip 
chmod +x terraform 
sudo mv terraform /usr/local/bin/ 

Download this project

To download this project and get in the directory, run the following commands:

Initialize Terraform

Terraform uses modules to deploy infrastructure. In order to initialize the modules you run: terraform init. This should download a few modules into a hidden directory called .terraform

Setup an S3 compatible object store

You need to use an S3 compatible object store in order to download closed source packages such as vCenter and the vSan SDK. Minio works great for this, which is an open source object store is a workable option.

You will need to layout the S3 structure to look like this:

https://s3.example.com: 
    | 
    |__ vmware 
        | 
        |__ VMware-VCSA-all-7.0-14367737.iso
        | 
        |__ vsanapiutils.py
        | 
        |__ vsanmgmtObjects.py

These files can be downloaded from My VMware.

You will need to find the two individual Python files in the vSAN SDK zip file and place them in the S3 bucket as shown above.

Modify your variables

There is a tfvars.template file that you can copy and use to update with your deployment variables. Run cp tfvars.template terraform.tfvars and open the file in a text editor to update the variables.

Required are:

• auth_token - This is your Equinix API key.
• ssh_private_key_path - The local private part of your Equinix Metal SSH key.
• public_ips_cidr - A block or blocks of Equinix Metal reserved IPs for your vCenter & ESXi Hosts.
• project_id - The Equinix Metal project you'd like to deploy this into.
• organization_id - Your Equinix Metal org.
• s3_access_key
• s3_secret_key
• s3_url
• s3_bucket_name - Bucket where the required files are located.

The others set how many hosts you'd like, their size, etc. You'll notice some default values in the tfvars.template file.

Deploy the Packet vSphere cluster

All there is left to do now is to deploy the cluster! Hopefully you don't get any errors

terraform apply

This should end with output similar to this:

Apply complete! Resources: 50 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed. 
 
Outputs: 
 
vCenter_Appliance_Root_Password = n4$REf6p*oMo2eYr 
vCenter_FQDN = vcva.packet.local 
vCenter_Password = bzN4UE7m3g$DOf@P 
vCenter_Username = [email protected] 

Cleaning the environement

To clean up a created environment (or a failed one), run terraform destroy --auto-approve.

If this does not work for some reason, you can manually delete each of the resources created in Packet (including the project) and then delete your terraform state file, rm -f terraform.tfstate.