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An Introduction to Packer

Recently I had an extended discussion about Packer with a fellow IT professional and recalled some material I had previously put together about Packer. Looking back at this material, I thought an expanded version of it might be worth writing up, with Windows Sysadmins in mind (since that’s my background).

What Problem Does It Solve?

I feel sometimes it’s best to start with what problem we are trying to solve, to help provide context for how a tool might be useful. A number of user stories can capture the problems Packer can solve.

As an Infrastructure Engineer, I want standardised templates for multiple platforms, so that template management is easier and consistent

This talks about a task that many infrastructure engineers and systems administrators have had to perform – regularly updating virtual machine templates on vCenter and other platforms. In some cases, this can be very onerous, so we want an easier way. In other cases, where the templates aren’t maintained, it can lead to increased deployment times (because the “Install Windows Updates” task during the SCCM task sequence takes longer and longer).

As a Security Engineer, I want our infrastructure across multiple platforms to adhere to the same security standards, so that my organisation’s data and reputation are protected

Home lab expansion

For a while now I’ve been hitting the capacity limit of the single server in my home lab. This is the nature of running a lot of VMware’s more recent products on it. The plan had been to get another server, shared storage and a larger switch. This week I was able to bring it all together. There were some problems.

What I already had

The original setup I had included the following items:

  • 1 Dell R710 with a Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 SSD (in a M.2 to PCIe adapter), a 128GB SATA SDD and a 1TB SATA SSD
  • 1 5-port Gigabit switch
  • 1 5-outlet power board

The Second Server

For the second server, I tried to get something that was as close to my current one as possible. This meant another Dell R710 with a similar model of CPU and about 128GB of RAM. Fortunately I was able to easily find one for sale on ebay. It came with 4 x 300GB SAS drives. I ended up moving 2 of these to the original server and creating a RAID 1 on each server.

vRealize Automation 8.1 New Features Walkthrough

VMware announced the general availability of vRealize Automation 8.1 a couple of weeks ago. This update includes a wide range of new features and capabilities. Some of these items restore functionality that was lost in transitioning from 7.x to 8.x (such as Approval Policies).

Governance and Policy

Version 8.1 adds some new items under Governance and Policy. Some of these include Approval Policy, limits on resources and view-only roles.

Approval Policy

Approval Policies have been expanded to be more in line with the functionality of what was in 7.x. In one of my first impressions posts about version 8.0, I noted there was only 2 policy types (Lease and Day 2 Actions). There is now a third option called simply Approval Policy.

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Updating to vRealize Automation 7.6 Hotfix 7

I had been burned by updating vRealize Automation a little too quickly following a hotfix release. Chrome 75 caused some rendering issues in the deployment forms. These issues were resolved by Hotfix 1, which introduced some extra issues. The most visible one is the duplicate requests on an XAAS (Anything as a Service) blueprint. An example of this behaviour is shown below

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The second issue that I’ve seen as cosmetic. It was resolved in Hotfix 2. In this issue, labels on an XAAS blueprint rendered correctly in the Designer but when requesting the blueprint via the catalog, the label text would wrap. An example of this is in the image below:

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PowerShell 7.0 – Cmdlet Compatibility

In my first post about PowerShell 7.0, I made mention of a major issue that most likely prevent adoption of PowerShell 6.x by Windows system administrators. This issue was the loss of functionality in 6.x, specifically that some cmdlets would not be available due to 6.x being built on .NET Core. The release of 7.0 is meant to help address this, which is the intent of this post.

Cmdlet Compatibility Approach

In reviewing the compatibility for 5.1 and 7.0, I used the management server in my home lab. This is a Windows Server 2019 virtual machine, so it shares the common set of cmdlets that Windows 10 has. As a management server, it also has some additional modules/cmdlets available:

  • Windows Server Role-based modules such as ActiveDirectory and DnsServer
  • SQLPS from the installation of SQL Server 2014
  • cmdlets associated with VMware’s PowerCLI
  • cmdlets associated with ChefDK
  • AWS’s PowerShell module

While not comprehensive, this does give good coverage of built-in, Microsoft-provided and third-party provided items.

Automating Vulnerability Scans – Nexpose/Powershell

One of the common things I’ve seen in automation implemented by infrastructure teams is a lack of rigor around testing. That is to say, code that tests the task that is being automated is actually successful. A script could execute to its end without errors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it actually did what it was supposed to.

This leads into a concern I’ve seen raised by stakeholders, about visibility of what is happening in an automation pipeline. One of the key stakeholders in this sort of security is the IT Security team, who often want visibility of certain outputs (like virtual machines) to determine if those are secure. In a couple of environments I’ve raised the idea of performing automated vulnerability scans on newly provisioned assets, as a way of ensuring what is delivered is at an acceptable level. By automating this task, we place no extra burden on those involved and ensure consistency.

vRealize Automation 8.0.1 Update Walkthrough

VMware have released a minor update for vRealize Automation (vRA) 8. This is my experience of attemtping to update the instance running in my home lab.

Update Preparation

In the Release Notes for 8.0.1 there’s a section for performing an upgrade. A couple of items in this section jump out. Firstly, that the vRA product supports upgrading from vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (LCM), with a link on the process. The second is an explicit mention of disk space requirements. Based on this, the first thing I checked was the free space for the two partitions mentioned.

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VMUG vRealize Suite 2019 and vRA 8

VMUG recent added the vRealize Suite 2019 to their EVALExperience offering. For those not familiar with it, EVALExperience is part of the paid “Advantage” member in VMUG. This paid membership includes discounts on training and other benefits. This is on top of benefits of free membership.

This new addition means it’s now possible to get a 365-day license for all the components of the vRealize Suite 2019, including vRealize Automation 8. The license is for personal use in a home lab. I had previously tried updating the license on my vRA 8 installation from an Advanced to an Enterprise one, using Lifecycle Manager. It didn’t like that.

Calling System Center Orchestrator Runbooks from vRealize Orchestrator

Sometimes you end up having to put in place an implementation that’s pretty crazy to get something (non-production) over the line. This was the case recently where I used vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) to call System Center Orchestrator (SCORCH) Runbooks. That is, using Orchestrator to call Orchestrator…

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A lot of the credit for figuring out how to do this goes to Laurie Rhodes and their blog post about calling SCORCH runbooks via REST using Powershell. It was my starting point for this piece of work and I was able to adapt the core pieces of this for my scenario.

vRO Configuration

Assuming there’s existing SCORCH and vRO instances, the first task is to add the SCORCH server as a REST host in vRO. This can be achieved by running the “Add a REST Host” workflow that comes with vRO. The “Orchestrator Web Service” runs on port 81, so that will affect the settings for the host.

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