Cisco CloudCenter Vagrant Plugin - Proof of Concept

This is a Vagrant plugin that adds a Cisco CloudCenter provider to Vagrant. It allows Vagrant to communicate with CloudCenter and have it control and provision machines in a number of public and private clouds.

This plugin is currently a Proof of Concept and has been developed and tested against Cisco CloudCenter 4.8.0 and Vagrant 1.9.5

Table of Contents

• Cisco CloudCenter Vagrant Plugin - Proof of Concept
  • Table of Contents
    • Features
    • Usage
    • Vagrantfile structure
    • Installation
    • Box Format
    • Configuration
    • Deployment Config
    • Synced Folders
    • Guidelines and Limitations
    • Development
    • License

Created by gh-md-toc

Features

• Boot instances through CloudCenter
• SSH into the instances
• Provision the instances with any built-in Vagrant provisioner
• Minimal synced folder support via rsync

Usage

After installing the plugin, add the CloudCenter sample box, and then use vagrant up --provider=cloudcenter to launch the instance

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-cloudcenter
...
$ vagrant box add dummy https://github.com/conmurphy/vagrant-cloudcenter/raw/master/example_box/cloudcenter.box
...
$ vagrant up --provider=cloudcenter
...

The following additional plugin commands have been provided:

• vagrant cloudcenter init - Create a template Vagrantfile and populate with your own configuration
• vagrant cloudcenter catalog - Return a list of the current available catalog
• vagrant cloudcenter jobs - Return a list of service requests and their current status

Vagrantfile structure

You can either manually create a Vagrantfile that looks like the following, filling in your information where necessary, or run the vagrant cloudcenter init command to have an empty Vagrantfile created for you.

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

	config.vm.box = 'cloudcenter'
	
 	config.ssh.private_key_path = ['/Users/MYUSERNAME/.ssh/id_rsa','/Users/MYUSERNAME/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key']
	config.ssh.insert_key = false
	
	config.vm.provider :cloudcenter do |cloudcenter|
		cloudcenter.username = 'my_username'
		cloudcenter.access_key = 'my_access_key'
		cloudcenter.host = 'cloudcenter_host_ip_address'
		cloudcenter.deployment_config = 'sample_deployment_config.json'
		cloudcenter.use_https = true
		cloudcenter.ssl_ca_file = '/Users/MYUSERNAME/MY_SSL_CA_FILE.crt'
	end
  
  	config.vm.synced_folder '.', '/opt/my_files/', type: 'rsync'

end

Installation

Box Format

The Vagrant CloudCenter plugin requires a box with configuration as outlined in this document.

Vagrant Box Format

• "vagrant" User
• Root Password: "vagrant"
• Password-less Sudo
• SSH Tweaks

Configuration

This provider exposes quite a few provider-specific configuration options:

• access_key - The access key for accessing the Cisco CloudCenter API
• username - The username for accessing the CloudCenter API
• host - The CloudCenter Manager address
• deployment_config - A JSON file used by CloudCenter to deploy the desired infrastructure
• use_https - Whether or not to use HTTPS when connecting to the CloudCenter API. Default is true
• ssl_ca_file - Location of your custom SSL CA file to use when connecting to the CloudCenter API. See the following document below for details on how to use your own customer client certificates with CloudCenter. This is not required if use_https is set to false

CloudCenter - Certificate Authentication

Deployment Config

This is a JSON file used by Cisco CloudCenter to deploy a new application into the environment of your choosing. It can be created by following these steps:

1. Access the application from the CCM UI and click Applications
2. Search for the required application in the Applications page
3. Select Deploy

4. Complete the required fields
5. Select Restful JSON

6. Save the JSON output into a new file on your local machine - if sharing a single file amongst multiple people or for multiple projects be sure to change the deployment job name so there is no overlap.
7. Use this file in the cloudcenter.deployment_config setting

Synced Folders

There is minimal support for synced folders. Upon vagrant up, vagrant reload, and vagrant provision, the CloudCenter provider will use rsync (if available) to uni-directionally sync the folder to the remote machine over SSH.

See Vagrant Synced folders: rsync

Guidelines and Limitations

• Currently tested with a single tier VM

Development

To work on the CloudCenter plugin, clone this repository then run the following commands to build and install the plugin.

$ gem build vagrant-cloudcenter.gemspec
$ vagrant plugin install ./vagrant-cloudcenter-0.3.0.gem

To uninstall the plugin run vagrant plugin uninstall vagrant-cloudcenter

License

This project is licensed to you under the terms of the Cisco Sample Code License.