Chef has long since offered great integrations with VMware’s vSphere product line, including knife-vsphere and chef-provisioning-vsphere (which also includes a Test Kitchen driver!). These integrations, created by awesome members of the Chef community, allow VMware administrators and end users to consume and manage their VMware resources from the comfort of their standard Chef tools.
Customers are also deploying VMware’s vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) to provide their own end users a self-service portal for requesting VMware resources while providing tools many enterprises need, including cost management and resource reservations.
One of the amazing things about Chef is the power and choice we offer to our users to choose one or many infrastructure providers while keeping your “infrastructure as code” consistent. At VMworld 2015, we were thrilled to announce a number of new Chef integrations for the VMware vRealize suite, giving our users another choice in infrastructure providers.
* **knife-vrealize:** A knife plugin that allows users to create and manage vRA-provided VMs, similar in nature to the knife-ec2 plugin. vRA administrators can author catalog items and blueprints in vRA that Chef users can consume straight from knife. Additionally, vRO users can execute arbitrary vRO workflows right from the knife CLI.
* **kitchen-vra:** A Test Kitchen driver that allows users to spin up VMs with vRA in order to test their cookbooks. After all, testing on your workstation is great, but there’s no substitute for testing on your production infrastructure!
* **kitchen-vro:** Another Test Kitchen driver that uses vRO workflows instead of vRA catalog items for spinning up test VMs.
For users of VMware vCloud Air, we have you covered, too!
* **knife-vcair:** A knife plugin for creating and managing VMs on vCloud Air.
* **kitchen-vcair:** A Test Kitchen driver for using vCloud Air VMs for testing your cookbooks.
These integrations are open-source and available for use. The READMEs in each of the repositories provides instructions on how to configure and use these new integrations.
We hope these new integrations help your experience with Chef and VMware to be even more delightful.
