Provisioning

This repo can create a VM image with HashiCorp Packer, provision VMs with Vagrant, and deploy Software on it using Ansible.

The VM can run locally on your laptop with a hypervisor like HyperV on Windows or Virtualbox. The VM will run AlmaLinux/8. Ansible will be installed in the VM, and the playbooks in the ansible directory are used.

Requirements

These programs should be installed.

HyperV on Windows

1. Open a PowerShell console as Administrator.
2. Run the following command:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V -All

VirtualBox

Alternatively you can install VirtualBox and its extension pack from virtualbox.org

Vagrant

Install Vagrant from a download from HashiCorp, or with:

Windows

choco install vagrant

macOS

brew install hashicorp/tap/hashicorp-vagrant

Linux

sudo yum install -y yum-utils
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/RHEL/hashicorp.repo
sudo yum -y install vagrant

Vagrant launches a VM from the image with vagrant up, that will download the almalinux/8 box for your hypervisor (hyperv/virtualbox/vmware_desktop/libvirt). Unless you created the image yourself with Packer.

Packer

Alternatively you could customize almalinux/8 yourself (with Hashicorp Packer) to use it for VMs.

Install Packer from a download from HashiCorp, or with:

	choco install packer --version=1.8.4 -y
	packer init --upgrade alma8.pkr.hcl

Creating an Azure VM base image

Azure howto

The Packer template alma8.pkr.hcl expects a couple of environment variables, when run from cli:

$env:ARM_LOCATION = "westeurope"
$env:ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID = ""
$env:ARM_RESOURCE_GROUP = "VMImageResourceGroup"
$env:ARM_STORAGE_ACCOUNT = "A_Global_unique_name"

Azure DevOps needs a service principal, the values in the output can be setup in the pipeline variables as secrets.

az ad sp create-for-rbac --role Contributor --scopes /subscriptions/<subscription_id> --query "{ client_id: appId, client_secret: password, tenant_id: tenant }"

Network switch in bridge mode

To properly construct a virtual switch in Hyper-V for working with Packer, follow these steps:

1. Open the Hyper-V Manager console and click on the Virtual Switch Manager option in the Actions pane.
2. Select the External option, and then click on Create Virtual Switch.
3. Name your virtual switch 'Wi-Fi' and select the physical network adapter that will be used for the external network.

Click on OK to create the virtual switch.

Network tuning

• disable packet coalescing on the wifi card settings in device manager.
• disable large send offload (for IPV4 and IPV6) from the 'Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet Adapter..' in device manager.

make virtualbox make hyperv

Packer will download the ISO and put it in the packer_cache directory. Partial downloads are appended.

Ansible

The Vagrant provisioner will install Ansible in the VM, if you need Ansible locally run source install.rc in a terminal to create a Python virtualenv on Linux, macOs or WSL.