Automating a RHEL 8 Installation Using the VMware REST Ansible Collection

Managing virtual machines in an IT infrastructure is often a common task, specifically VMware virtualization technology has been around for over 20 years. VMware administrators spend a lot of their time in automating the creation, management, and removal of virtual instances that contain various operating systems. One operating system that often resides on VMware infrastructure is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

With the introduction of VMware REST APIs, we recently announced the initial release of the vmware.vmware_rest Collection, for production use. As opposed to the community.vmware Collection, the vmware.vmware_rest Collection is based on next generation VMware REST APIs. This new Collection no longer requires any third party Python bindings to communicate with VMware infrastructure. A large part of the new Collection that has been introduced is support for automating virtual machine operations.

In this blog post I will show you how VMware users can automate the installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8) using the vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_vm module and a valid Kickstart file.

Scenario requirements

For this scenario, we will assume following requirements:

vCenter 7.0.1 or latest with at least one ESXi
RHEL 8 installation DVD
Ansible
vmware.vmware_rest Continue reading

Automating Helm using Ansible

Increasing business demands are driving the need for increased automation to support rapid, yet stable, and reliable deployments of applications and supporting infrastructure. Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies are no different. For the Kubernetes platform, Helm is the standard means of packaging, configuring and deploying applications and services onto any cluster.

We recently released the kubernetes.core 1.1, our first Red Hat Certified Content Collection release, for general use. A big part of the new content that has been introduced is support for automating Helm operations. In this blog post, I will show you some common scenarios for its use in your automation.

Please note that prior to the release of kubernetes.core 1.1, its contents were released as community.kubernetes. With this content becoming Red Hat support and certified content, a name change was in order. We are in the process of making that transition.

A Quick Introduction to Helm

Helm is an open source tool used for packaging and deploying applications on Kubernetes. It is often called Kubernetes Package Manager. It is widely adopted by the Kubernetes community and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduate project.

Helm simplifies deployment of the applications by abstracting Continue reading