demo-pe3-r10k

Vagrant environment for demo'ing PE3 w/ r10k and current best practices for building out self-contained environments (classification, code & data bindings) per recent Pro Services discussions.

The r10k setup leverages the work done in the zack/r10k Forge module. This includes a custom pre-run command in puppet.conf and an MCollective plug-in to allow r10k operations via Live Management in the Enterprise Console.

Also, the environments built out by r10k aim to be self-contained. Meaning the directories include:

• hierdata directory
• modules directory built out via Puppetfile
• manifests/site.pp for classification via code

Note that this structure for self-contained environments is roughly compatible with the recent work done by Eric Shamow and Carl Caum on Puppet Enterprise Continuous Delivery support.

References & Supporting Materials

Supporting materials to help you grok the problem r10k tries to solve and the approach:

• Git Submodules Are Probably Not The Anwser
• Rethinking Puppet Deployment
• Puppet Infrastructure with R10K

Requirements

• VirtualBox >= 4.2
• Vagrant >= 1.2
• vagrant-oscar ( '$ vagrant plugin install oscar' )
• vagrant-pe_build ( '$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-pe_build' )
• vagrant-auto_network ( '$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-auto_network' )
• vagrant-hosts ( '$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-hosts' )
• librarian-puppet ( '$ sudo gem install librarian-puppet' )

Upgrades

The environment has been ported to the Vagrant oscar plugin as of release 2.0.0. Users of 1.0.0 will almost certainly want to wipe out old VMs and settings before doing a 'vagrant up' with the new release:

$ cd <repo>
$ vagrant destroy -f
$ rm -rf .vagrant
$ (cd puppet && rm -rf modules)
$ git pull

Usage

(perhaps after Upgrade directions above)

$ cd <repo>
$ (cd puppet && librarian-puppet install --verbose)
$ vagrant up

Notes

• The vagrant environment will download the required Vagrant baseboxes if they've not already been installed. This can result in quite a long first run.
• Login to console via: https:// w/ creds: [email protected]/puppetlabs.
• r10k builds out environments in master:/etc/puppetlabs/puppet/environments based on the branches in githhub.com/nvalentine-puppetlabs/demo-pe3-r10k-environments. You can point r10k to a different repo by modifying the Hiera key in puppet/hierdata/common.yaml.

Troubleshooting

• vagrant-hosts sometimes fails to insert the master's hostname into the /etc/hosts files on the agent VMs. One work-around is to run 'vagrant provision --provision-with hosts' a couple of times until the necessary entries have been generated.

• For bug reports, the following command will be surpremely useful (to me):

  $ VAGRANT_LOG=DEBUG vagrant up 2>&1 | tee /tmp/demo-pe-r10k-vagrant.runlog

Implementation details

• There's currently a bug in the vagrant-auto_network plugin that necessitates having each VM initially assiged the IP address 0.0.0.0. This is a temporary hack.