Automating vSphere Integrated Containers Deployments

In the second half of 2016 I had an opportunity to focus (almost) exclusively on vSphere Integrated Containers all the way through its GA in early December.

I had been working on VIC Engine and project Bonneville since 2015 but in H2 2016 I focused pretty much full-time on that and I had the pleasure to be involved in the discussions that led vSphere Integrated Containers to be what it is today.

As part of my job I found myself in situations where I had to tear up and down environments for test and other various purposes. Because of this I had been using a script (with many rough edges) to properly setup, against a given vSphere environment, the three VIC components (i.e. VIC Engine, Harbor and Admiral).

I figured I’d share that script publicly at this point as it may benefit (somehow) the community. This isn’t only for being able to use it as-is (it could be adapted and enhanced to fit your specific needs) but also because it may show you how each component is being setup and installed (you can read through the script and see how the mechanic works).

The script is called vic-product-machine.sh and it is available at this GitHub repo.

This solution is nothing more than the codified version of the user workflows we created for the alpha and beta phases of the VIC product (where users were given a step by step flow to setup an end-to-end VIC stack).

The purpose of this script was (also) to validate whether the documented steps where technically valid.

Using code to perform documentation quality checks, if you will. Mh…

In case this script will evolve over time I am going to document what it does and what its major limitations are on GitHub so you can always read the latest (Vs printing a description in stone on a static blog post while the code, potentially, evolves).

Please move to the GitHub repo of the project if you want to read more about it (and if you want to give it a try).

Massimo.