PE 2.0 » Cloud Provisioning » Overview

← Orchestration: Usage and Examples — Index — Cloud Provisioning: Configuring and Troubleshooting →

A Cloud Provisioning Overview

Puppet Enterprise ships with command-line tools for provisioning new nodes. You can use these tools to:

Create and destroy virtual machine instances on VMware vSphere and Amazon EC2
Classify new nodes (virtual or physical) in the console
Automatically install and configure PE on new nodes (virtual or physical)

When used together, these tools provide a quick and efficient workflow for adding nodes to your Puppet Enterprise environment.

See the chapters on VMware and AWS provisioning for details about creating and destroying virtual machines. After that, the chapter on classifying nodes and installing PE covers actions that work on any new machine, virtual or physical.

Tools

PE’s provisioning tools are based around the node, node_vmware, and node_aws subcommands. Each of these subcommands have a selection of available actions (such as list and start). You can get information about a subcommand or its actions with the puppet help and puppet man commands.

The VMware and AWS subcommands are only used for provisioning, but node is a pre-existing Puppet subcommand with several provisioning actions added to it. The node actions used in the provisioning process are:

classify
init
install

You may also find the clean action useful when decommissioning nodes.

The VMware and AWS provisioning tools are powered by Fog, the Ruby cloud services library. Fog is automatically installed on any machine receiving the cloud provisioner role.

Prerequisites

The cloud provisioning tools ship with Puppet Enterprise 2.0 and later.

Services

The following services and credentials are required:

For VMware you will need:

VMware vSphere 4.0 and later
VMware vCenter

For Amazon Web Services you will need:

An existing Amazon account with support for EC2

Installing

Cloud provisioning can be installed on any puppet master or agent node.

The Puppet Enterprise installer and upgrader ask whether to install cloud provisioning during installation; answer ‘yes’ to enable cloud provisioning actions on a given node.

If you’re using an answer file to install Puppet Enterprise, this capability can be installed by setting the q_puppet_cloud_install option to y.

q_puppet_cloud_install=y