jvdupuy / chaperone

Chaperone

Chaperone is an Automation toolkit rooted in DevOps principals for deploying and configuring a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) based Hybrid Cloud Management platform. It is intended to expedite and standardize "typical" deployments and configuration of VMware solutions including vSphere/vCenter, NSX, VIO, vRA, vRO, vROps, vRLI, vRB and others as the toolkit grows.

Chaperone is a work in progress. We will continue to add new functionality and products to the Chaperone base.

##Chaperone Overview The Chaperone toolkit consists of

• web based interfaces for configuring and triggering the deployment of VMware solutions
• Ansible roles and modules supporting deployment of those solutions
  • ansible-role-ansible
  • ansible-role-assets
  • ansible-role-ovftool
  • ansible-module-chaperone
  • this is a small subset of notable roles and modules. See the repo manifest for more
• Ansible playbooks, called by the web interface, to combine sets of roles into useful groupings of features
• Extras
  • docker-chaperone

###Current Standard Configurations Supported

The plays are used to configure and deploy one of several standard platforms. The following are under active development, but are considered fairly complete:

• Chaperone for VIO (Open Stack Integration)
• Chaperone for CNA (Cloud Native Application Platform)
• Chaperone for CMP (Hybrid Cloud Management Platform)

###Setup and Run Chaperone There are more documents for setting up and running the Chaperone tools against an appropriate SDDC environment.

###User Interfaces There are two interfaces with which users of Chaperone interact:

• chaperone-admin-ui (e.g., 'http://chaperone-admin-ui.corp.local')
• chaperone-ui (e.g., 'http://chaperone-ui.corp.local')

Note the use of internal domains in the URLs above. This is common where developers or users do not have rights to create new domains in their DNS servers, and thus make use of locally defined domains. More on that in the setup documentation.

####Using the Chaperone Admin UI The admin UI (chaperone-admin-ui) is an interface that allows one to select from a list of SDDC features they would like to deploy, and basic ambient environment information, such as DNS servers, NTP servers, etc. Once entered into the various "Prepare" menu forms, clicking 'Save' saves the configuration as a 'codified design.' Basically, that means the information is saved in a YAML file as a set of parameters or, more commonly Ansible variables.

Once the chaperone-admin-ui "Prepare" menu forms are complete and saved, the next step is clicking on the "Install" menu and thereafter "Saving the Configuration." That is a button on the "Install" menu that generates the second web interface, the chaperone-ui site.

####Using the Chaperone UI The chaperone-ui site is the site used to configure the SDDC installations. The process is the same as chaperone-admin-ui, wherein the user fills out the "Prepare" forms and saves them. Thereafter, the "Install" menu provides buttons for the various tasks that must be done to complete the SDDC install. To perform the various installations and configurations, Chaperone generally runs Ansible plays as a result of clicking on one of the Install menu buttons. The plays configure and deploy the environment, pursuant to the saved "Prepare" values.

##Developer's Guide ###Prerequisites The assumption Chaperone makes for developers is not something one would propose is light, but not out of the norm for many. We assume reasonable competence in the following:

• VMware technologies
• Google Repo
• git
• gerrit
• Python
• Ansible

###Contributing Committers (those with rights to merge code) will also need credentials to our Gerrit server. For the time being, this is an internal process at VMware as all committers are currently at VMware.

With that said, the Chaperone team welcomes contributions from the community. If you wish to contribute code, we require that you first sign our Contributor License Agreement and return a copy to [email protected] before you submit a Pull Request for review and potential merge into the code base.

###Getting the code Instructions to download, install and deploy the Chaperone UI tools and underlying Ansible plays, Python modules and other required code bases are here

###Structure and Standards TODO

###Development Workflow TODO

License and Copyright

Copyright 2016 VMware, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Author Information

Initially created in 2015 by Tom Hite / VMware.