Curious about how I would leverage my VMWare environment with Waypoint?

Waypoint
1

Hello,

Although potentially a legacy infrastructure I know many companies that have significant investments in VMWare.

I run a vCentre Server & ESX test lab and am curious how I would go about integrating these natively with Waypoint.

Is EXEC the option that should be leveraged today until a plugin for VMWare is developed?

I love the new gitOps workflow capabilities and this would help me potentially create a more secure workflow for my Packer builds.

Awesome project - thanks everyone!

Graham

2

Hello!
When you use the exec plugin, the Waypoint Entrypoint binary is not injected into images, thereby removing the functions of $waypoint logs and $waypoint exec.

I think that there are two pieces needed here for Waypoint to add in order to support both building VMs with Waypoint (and its workflow) and deploying/releasing to vSphere:

  1. A Build plugin to create the VM by using Packer or another tool. The Packer plugin would need to take in the Packer .hcl file for the Packer-specific configuration (e.g., what type of image to build - for example, an AMI or a VMX, etc?).

  2. Deploy and Release plugins to deploy and release to vSphere. I don’t know enough about the architecture of vCenter – but I think that someone might have to author multiple plugins and pipe data. Perhaps a hook? This is where I am out of my depth.

@briancain and @nic? What are your thoughts?

Edit - I also want to clarify that the EC2 plugin does not build a VM - it uses the AMI search function in AWS to look up a VM that has already been built. Plugin: AWS EC2 | Waypoint by HashiCorp (waypointproject.io)

app “vm-test” {
build {
use “packer” {
…
}
deploy {
use “vsphere” ???

}
}

…

}

3

Thank you.

Yes, that would make a lot of sense.
I have both the packer and tfc components today so plug-ins as you mention would work.

4

I think that there are two pieces needed here for Waypoint to add in order to support both building VMs with Waypoint (and its workflow) and deploying/releasing to vSphere:

Yep, this makes sense to me. To support VMs, we’d want a build plugin like packer for generating vm artifacts, and for shipping that built artifact we’d want something like vsphere for the deploy/release phase.