Infrastructure as Code for VMware with HashiCorp Terraform

Infrastructure as code approaches can be applied, not only to cloud operations, but also to infrastructure management within private data centers using familiar VMware tools like vSphere and NSX-T. If you're working in both environments, the number of tools required to take this approach can be significant.

However, HashiCorp's open source Terraform product lets you automate infrastructure provisioning with code using one tool across any environment; public clouds and private data centers. Terraform's VMware integrations in the form of providers makes it easy for VMware system administrators to adopt the same infrastructure as code approach as their cloud-focused peers.

In this webinar, HashiCorp solutions engineer Adam Cavaliere and VMware cloud management technical lead Grant Orchard show you how to get started with Terraform's infrastructure as code approach in your VMware environments.

What you'll learn

• Why infrastructure as code for VMware environments
• Terraform for VMware with providers for vSphere and NSX-T
• Addressing organizational challenges with workspaces, modules, configuration designer, and Sentinel policy as code governances
• Demo and how to get started using modules
• Q&A at 45:00

Questions answered

• Are there any publicly available vSphere Modules? I didn't see any in the Terraform registry. [Answer] A vSphere module has been created and is currently in GitHub. It will be published to the registry very soon. If you do would like to grab it from the GitHub repo you can use our getting started guide, which will walk you through that process, or go directly to the repo here.
• Should we store passwords in Vault? (Vault is embedded in TFE)
• Terraform and Ansible are often the two infrastructure as code tools that are compared. Can you explain what makes Terraform stand out for VMware deployments?
• Is network_interface always considered a sub resource? Can we not write a count to create multiple interfaces? Is there a plan to support count for sub resources too?
• For a workflow where there are a lot of release swim lanes such as Systems Integration Testing, QA, Staging, Production—how can we easily use Terraform for the different environments?
• Can you say more about your workflow for keeping secrets out of your TF code?
• What is the best GitHub source to read more Terraform file samples?
• For Grant, any idea when the content library source will be available for Terraform?
• How/Where do you store and manage your state files?
• Is there a plan to support a KVM provider too?
• Can we run Terraform apply/check on the GitHub.com location direction, for example: gitub.com/xxx/yyy.tf?
• What can I do when my architecture is microservices and I need to do CI of each microservice represented in several repositories? How can I save or integrate all backups for external services like DB, etc.?
• AFAIK the secrets are not encrypted in tfstate file and that's a long term problem. Any plans to solve that?
• Is there the vSAN support at this moment or what is the roadmap?