AWS – Elastic Load Balancers and Cloudforms

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

First entry in ages, but those who know me will have seen I have been visiting a few places around the globe. Anyway, I promised some time ago the ability to add Amazon EC2 Instances to Amazon Elastic Load Balancers, here it is.

Problem was that whilst I have spent a couple of hours here and there on airplanes recently, its still quite difficult to connect to AWS from them! So any work on this had to wait until airport lounges. Its done now so here is the entry for it.

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inspectXML – Dump objects as XML

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

This is pretty simple but very useful. I have done a little research and whilst inspect is a way of seeing inside of an object its also hard to read and not very re-usable. Being somewhat old now (crazy thought) XML used to be the way we described things. Yes I know yaml, json etc have come to replace XML in languages such as Ruby, but I cannot get away from XML is far easier to read and self describing than the aforementioned.

If you have used InspectME that ships with the product then this is the same but in XML format, with a few advantages…

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InfoBlox IPAM and CloudFORMS Integration Part 1

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

This subject is only the hottest on the block at the moment…why? I guess because InfoBlox is pretty cool, it provides DHCP, DNS and IP Address Management services for any size of network. Its fairly easy to configure and InfoBlox are a good company who allow you to try their software for 60 days eval license. You can integrate using simple RestAPI (there is a Ruby GEM, but I don’t advise using it, I found it problematic, and Rest is so easy anyway!)

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Dialogs – Dynamic DropDowns

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

Its here and looks great. You can now populate a drop down list from an external source!

Simply create an Instance and Method, its advised you create a new Namespace to store dialog controls into rather than mixing them up into the general automation model.

The method requires the following code behind it;

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Built In Method Example

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

These been some discussion about Build-In vs In-line methods,  here is a quick example of a Built-In method that sends email from instance attributes that is quite commonly done as a In-Line method when it does not need to be In-Line.

Start by creating a Class called Email

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Placement Profile – Best Fit Cluster using Tags

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

CloudFORMS has workflows for many different tasks including approval, quotas and placement to name just a few. This blog entry is going to add to the placement category of workflows. A previous post of mine showed how you could place new workloads NOT_NEAR “Workload Placement by Type (Not Near That)” other workloads which I still think is really cool. This placement workflow is quite simple, it matches template tags against cluster tags. Example;

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VM ReConfigure Approval Emails

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

The base automate model does not contain the email methods for the VM Reconfigure approval process, this post gives you this capability.

Ensure your CFME appliance can send a test email from the configuration page. If you get the test email, then continue otherwise keep trying until you do!

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Exporting VM (VMware)

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

This is a really simple export routine for VMware using a custom button.

In an implementation I would maybe wrap this with

  1. A dialog to offer different export locations and naming of the export to include date/time stamp and maybe a checkbox to enable disable the overwrite of existing exports.
  2. Add in the approval system, basically some workloads should require authorisation by a manager to allow the export, we could do this by tag, and capture this in the method.
  3. Some error checking and folder creation stuff in the simple method.

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CloudFORMS CFME on KVM

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

If you so happen to have the VMware OVF version of CloudFORMs CFME, and you want to convert to run on KVM, this is how.

1. If the OVF is zipped, Unzip the appliance image:

$ unzip evm-v5.1.0.4-r.zip

2. Convert each of the 5 disks from VMDK format to RAW:
$ for i in `seq 1 5`; do qemu-img convert -p evm-v5.1.0.4-r/ovf-disk$i.vmdk disk$i.img; done

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