Designing your first Cloud Assembly blueprint for vSphere

In my previous post I configured a vSphere Cloud Zone including Flavor- and Image Mappings, Storage- and Network Profiles. In this post I will walk you through how to design your first Cloud Assembly blueprint for vSphere using the Cloud Account, Cloud Zone and all other configurations you setup in the previous posts.

Create your first vSphere Blueprint

1. In Cloud Assembly under the Blueprint tab click New.
2. Enter a name for the blueprint and select your Project. Click Create.
3. From the left menu drag a vSphere Machine and a vSphere Network component to the canvas. In the right pane of the blueprint screen, the YAML editor, infrastructure-as-code will automatically be generated for the selected components.
4. Let’s modify the YAML code of the vSphere Machine.
   1. Remove the following lines:
      • cpuCount: 1
      • total MemoryMB: 1024
   2. Add a image value to the image property. For example, image: ‘centos’
   3. Add a flavor property with a value. For example, flavor: ‘small’
   4. Drag a connection from the vSphere Machine to the vSphere Network component. In the YAML code, a network dependency will automatically be created.
5. Now, modify the vSphere network YAML code.
   1. Under the networks property, add a assignment property with the value static. (If you want your IP address to be assigned by DHCP, set the value to dynamic)
   2. Enter a name for the network.
   3. Add a Constraints property followed by a tag. Add the tag you used for the vSphere network which has an IP-range configured. For example, ‘ipam:true’.
6. In the blueprint screen, click Version.
7. Enter a version number and optionally a Description and Change Log. Click Create.
8. In the blueprint screen, click Deploy.
9. Select Create a new deployment.
10. Enter a Deployment Name.
11. Select the Blueprint Version and click Deploy.
12. In Cloud Assembly under the Deployments tab, you can see the progress of your deployment.
13. When the deployment is successfull, the status of the deployed Resources are shown.
14. Under Networks, you can check if the VM is given a Static IP address from the configured IP-range.
15. And finally, login to vCenter to check if the VM is running.

In my next post I wil show you how to integrate your on-premises Puppet Enterprise environment with Cloud Assembly and use Puppet Roles for deploying software.