I’m happy to inform everyone that dailyhypervisor has a new author that will be bringing you some great cloud management content. Chris Lennon a very talented individual on the VMware National Software Defined Enterprise Solution Engineering Team. Chris has expert knowledge in vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Configuration manager, and more. You can check out Chris’s bio here.
Dailyhypervisor is also getting some new guest bloggers as well. I would like to also welcome Gary Coburn and Paul Gifford as guest bloggers who will also be posting articles related to cloud automation and the software defined datacenter. Look for some great new content to from these great new contributors.
If you haven’t looked at Code Stream, you may want to now. Code Stream as you may or may not know is VMware’s DevOps product, but what you may not know is that with this management pack it adds some features to your vRA deployment that you may be interested in. Now this isn’t totally new it is in version 2.0 as you can see. The management pack allows you to utilize Code Stream to automate the SDDC lifecycle of templates, blueprints, workflows, dashboards, scripts and more within vRA. This is pretty cool right. If you want to use a blueprint for two tenants your can automate the lifecycle of these blueprints which I think is awesome.
This is for all you MacBook users out there. If you are like me and run a VM to use the VMRC console, well those days are over. VMware Remote Console 7.1 for mac was released yesterday!
Last October, VMware announced the release of the first standalone VMware Remote Console application for Windows. Yesterday, VMware went live with the first-ever VMware Remote Console (VMRC) for Mac OS. Until the end of last year, VMRC has been a plug-in component in the web clients of vSphere, vCloud Director, and vRealize Automation. Until this release of VMRC for Mac, customers on Mac clients were limited to using a basic HTML console and a plugin-based device control.
Google has scheduled the deprecation of the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) in Chrome browsers in September 2015, which will stop the legacy VMware Remote Console plug-in in web clients from functioning. VMware will continue to add VMRC support for different platforms so that customers will have plugin-independent access to VM console functionality and operations, as well as client device connections to VMs on remote ESXi hosts.
VMRC can be launched directly from vSphere web client versions 5.5u2b and 6.0, as well as URLs specifying ESXi host and VM information. The application supports Mac OS 10.8 and up.
You can find the VMware Remote Console (VMRC) for Mac Download here.
Version 1.1.0 of vRelize Code Stream has been released today. For those who are not familiar vRealize Code Stream is a release automation tool for continuos integration / continuos development environments allowing for a rapid development, testing, and provisioning of environments.
New features in this latest release include:
Getting Started Tab – Provide step-by-step instructions on how to do initial vRCS configuration and create a release pipeline with the help of videos and documentation.
Release Pipeline Modeling Enhancements – Drag & Drop Stages and Tasks, Copy Tasks and Cancel pipeline execution.
Simplified Endpoint Registration Support for Jenkins server and vRealize Automation server.
If you read my blogs you know I’m usually all business talking tech and providing my readers with what I hope is useful information. Today I’m writing to ask for your support. My wife and I are raising money for Muscular Dystrophy by participating in the Harley Davidson Ride for life fund raiser. Last year Ride for Life donated $1.09M dollars to the MDA as part of this charitable event and hopefully this year we can raise even more.
My ask of you:
If you have found the information on this blog useful please show your support by donating to Ride for Life. My wife and I are trying to reach a goal of $3,000 raised for MDS through Ride for Life. Any donation you can make is greatly appreciated. You can make a donation by visiting my donation page at http://www2.mda.org/site/TR/General/22-NortheastDivision?px=3059956&pg=personal&fr_id=12249. For every dollar raised a matching donation will be made by VMware Foundation up to $3,141.59 as part of their Matching Gift program for employees. All donation must be in by 5/1/2015.
Regardless of whether you are able to donate or not I want to thank you all for following my blog and may you all have happiness and good health!
So far I have covered how to setup Git, Eclipse, Jenkins, Code Stream, and a little Artifactory. We have Eclipse checking code into Git and Jenkins pulling the code and simply building it into a tar.gz file. We also have Code Stream setup to use Artifactory and established the means by which Code Stream will talk to Jenkins, but we are still missing some pieces we need before we can really dig into how to use Code Stream. I know this may seem a bit confusing, but I promise it will all make sense very soon.
We now need to connect Jenkins to Artifactory. Why you ask? We are going to connect Jenkins to Artifactory so it can publish the tar,gz file as an artifact in the Artifactory repository. We need to do this so we can later have code stream pull it from Artifactory. the cool part is not only can we utilize this artifact with Code Stream, but it can be used with out solutions as well like vRealize Application Services if we wanted. Ok let’s not get to far ahead. In this article we are simply going to connect Jenkins to Artifactory and modify our build to publish the tar.gz file as an artifact to a repository.
For those of you who are fortunate enough to be able to get a trial for Code Stream this article will walk you through the installation and initial configuration of the product. Code stream as the name suggest is part of the vRealize product line and shares the same identity appliance and virtual appliance as vRealize Automation. Because of this I will be referring to articles I have already written for portions of the installation in an effort to not re-invent the wheel.
*Note – The instructions in the above referenced article may vary slightly from vRCS 6.0 identity appliance, however it should be close enough that you should not have any issues following along.
It is recommended that you configure the Active Directory settings in the Identity Applaince which is not covered in the above post, but is straight forward.
*Note – The instructions in the above referenced article may vary slightly from the vRCS Virtual Appliance, however it should be close enough that you should not have any issues following along.
On step 21 input the Code Stream License Key instead of the vRA license key, or both if you like.
3. For instructions on how to setup Tenants in vRealize Code Stream please see Adding Tenants in vRealize Autoamtion 6.x.
On step 7 you will not be able to add a user to the “Infrastructure Administrator” role as that is a construct of vRealize Automation. If you are running code stream and vRealize Automation on the same virtual appliance you can add users/groups to this role.
In part 1 of this article we deployed both GitLab and Jenkins, configured a Git project and connected it to the Eclipse IDE. In this article we will focus on configuring the Jenkins server to work with our GitLab repository and crate a Jenkins job to build our project.
Configuring Jenkins for GitLab
1. Before we can create a job we need to add some plugins to the Jenkins server for GitLab. We need to make sure we have the following plugins installed by going to the Jenkins server, the Manage Jenkins, and then Manage Plugins.
2. Next go to the “Installed” tab to see which if any of the needed plugins are already installed. The plugings that are needed are:
I realize many of you looking to understand what Code Stream can do to help you with your Continuous Integration needs already have Git Jenkins and a whole ton of other tools. However for those who don’t yet have anything in place or for those who are looking to get a better understanding of where it fits into the mix I am going to walk through some simple setup examples to get you up and going. To start we need to have two foundational elements in place; Git and Jenkins.
As part of the Git setup I’m going to help you get Git in place and tie your IDE (Eclipse) into Git for publishing code check-ins to your repository. Then we will deploy a Jenkins server and integrate both Git with Jenkins to create simple builds that we can use with Code Stream.
What we need to get started
To begin we will need to have two servers deployed in the environment. The first will be got Git and the second for Jenkins. In my lab I deployed Centos 6.3 because I already had a template available. I would recommend you have these deployed and ready.
Deploying a Git Server
I choose to use GitLab community edition for my Git server. It seemed to offer the most options and flexibility for the lab. The gitlab community edition is available at https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/.
Once you choose the version that appropriate for your OS version the installation is pretty simple. Gitlab provides you with basic installation steps which as pretty straight forward. Those installation steps for Centos 6 are:
In December of 2014 VMware released version 1.0 of a new product named vRealize Code Stream. If you haven’t been following you may not be aware of what exactly it does and why you may be interested in checking it out. These days DevOps is all the buzz like the term cloud has been for the last few years. If your boss hasn’t come to you yet asking what your doing about DevOps, it’s sure to happen soon. You know the conversation. The one where your boss has heard about or read about this new technology called DevOps. Now you and I both know DevOps is not a technology, but more of a process or a partnership between Development and Operation. We are now faced with the scenario where there is so much buzz around DevOps that the majority doesn’t really know what it is, but they know they want it.
What does this have to do with vRealize Code Stream? Code Stream is a product designed to aid you on your journey to DevOps. It’s not an end all be all solution, but it aims to help you get there. VMware understands that many of you will need help in making this transformation and that’s where this product comes in. Code Stream is only a part of the solution, the other half of the solution is highly skilled consultants to help guide you on this transition. You may recall hearing about VMware acquiring a company named Momentum SI. Momentum SI is a consulting company with very skilled DevOps consultants. Why does all this matter? It matters because VMware is making an investment in not only providing you with solutions to help you automate your Continuous Integration needs, but skilled consultants that can help guide you along the way.
So how does Code Stream help you with Continuous Integration? It helps by proving a layer of automation and governance that doesn’t exist today requiring most organizations to resort to cobbled together scripts and tools to get the job done. This method is the lack of visibility when something fails. The lost time spend by development and operations troubleshooting when something breaks can amount to millions each year. Code Streams visibility will help you understand where the problem is so you can resolve it quickly and efficiently.
When a problem happens code stream draws your attention to the failed task so you can focus on where to start troubleshooting. If you look at the below image you can see that what pushing code changes to the staging environment something failed. You can also see exactly what was happening at the time of failure. In this case the needed artifact wasn’t available in staging and the dependency needed to be resolved.
When you resolve the problem you can see that Code Stream can progress you code through Testing, Staging, and right on to Production.
Code Stream includes integration to Git, Jenkins, vRa, and other popular tools in this space. It also includes an embedded instance of Artifactory, and not the open source version of Artifactory, but the full version with all features available. Over the next few weeks I will be walking you through how to use vRealize Code Stream and how it can help you automate your code release and continuous integration needs. I will start with some foundational information on Git, Jenkins, Artifactory and some of the other tools we will use and then dive into using Code Stream to tie them all together to create an automated pipeline release across Dev, test, QA, staging, and production.
