vRA Deployments with Terraform

This post covers notes made when using Terraform to deploy basic resources from VMware vRealize Automation (vRA). Read through the vRA provider plugin page here and the Terraform documentation here. There are a couple of other examples of Terraform configurations using the vRA provider here and here. If you’re looking for an introduction on why Terraform and vRA then this blog post gives a good overview. If you have worked with the vRA Terraform provider before feel free to add any additional pointers or best practises in the comments section, as this is very much a work in progress.

Terraform Setup

Before starting you will need to download and install Go and Git to the machine you are running Terraform from. Visual Studio Code with the Terraform extension is also a handy tool for editing config files but not a requirement. The steps below were validated with Windows 10 and vRA 7.3.

After installing Go the default GOROOT is set to C:\Go and GOPATH to %UserProfile%\Go. Go is the programming language we will use to rebuild the vRA provider plugin. GOPATH is going to be the location of the directory containing source files for Go projects.

In this instance I have set GOPATH to D:\Terraform and will keep all files in this location. To change GOPATH manually open Control Panel, System, Advanced system settings, Advanced, Environment Variables. Alternatively GOROOT and GOPATH can be set from CLI:

set GOROOT=C:\Go
set GOPATH=D:\Terraform

Download Terraform for Windows, put the executable in the working directory for Terraform (D:\Terraform or whatever GOPATH was set to).

In AppData\Roaming create a new file terraform.rc (%UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\terraform.rc) with the following contents, replace D:\Terraform with your own Terraform working directory.

providers {
     vra7 = "D:\\Terraform\\bin\\terraform-provider-vra7.exe"
}

Open command prompt and navigate to the Terraform working directory. Run the following command to download the source repository:

go get github.com/vmware/terraform-provider-vra7et GOROOT=C:\Go

Open the Terraform working directory and confirm the repository source files have been downloaded.

The final step is to rebuild the Terraform provider using Go. Download the latest version of dep. Rename the executable to dep.exe and place in your Terraform working directory under \src\github.com\vmware\terraform-provider-vra7.

Back in command prompt navigate to D:\Terraform\src\github.com\vmware\terraform-provider-vra7 and run:

dep ensure
go build -o D:\Terraform\bin\terraform-provider-vra7.exe

Running dep ensure can take a while, use the -v switch if you need to troubleshoot. The vRA Terraform provider is now ready to use.

Using Terraform

In the Terraform working directory a main.tf file is needed to describe the infrastructure and set variables. There are a number of example Terraform configuration files located in the source repository files under \src\github.com\vmware\terraform-provider-vra7\example.

A very basic example of a configuration file would first contain the vRA variables:

provider "vra7" {
     username = "username"
     password = "password"
     tenant = "vRAtenant"
     host = "https://vRA
}

Followed by the resource details:

resource "vra7_resource" "machine" {
   catalog_name = "BlueprintName"
}

Further syntax can be added to pass additional variables, for a full list see the resource section here. The configuration file I am using for the purposes of this example is as follows:

main_tf

Example config and variable files from source repo:

multi_machine_example

variables_example

Once your Terraform configuration file or files are ready go back to command prompt and navigate to the Terraform working directory. Type terraform and hit enter to see the available options, for a full list of commands see the Terraform CLI documentation here.

Start off with initialising the vRA provider plugin: