I'm a newbie in the orchestration/provisioning world. Today, I had the chance to explore Vagrant. One major downfall for me is it doesn't support VMware Player out of the box. Our company is standardized on VMware and all our developers are working w/ VMware Player locally. I cannot convince management to use Virtualbox instead, people are too used to it at the moment.
Is there any alternative solution which supports VMware Player out of the box? I'm looking into Foreman as we speak or is there any "better" alternative?
https://www.vagrantup.com/vmware/index.html
Vagrant supports vmware
I’m confused, VMware Player (AKA VMware Workstation Player) is the free for non commercial use version of Workstation… or are you using old licences for Player before it was rebranded to Workstation?
Ansible is good for provisioning but it works at the OS level, not at a hyperviser level. I’m not sure what you could use for deployment automation with VMware Player though.
Are you working on Windows machines? You could use Hyper-V with Vagrant, it’s built into Windows 8.1+.
VMware like to restrict free products so chances of something else working are slim, even the free ESXi has no automation/api capabilities, to make it work with Vagrant you have to permanently enable SSH access to the host.
Personally the efficiencies gained with something like Vagrant makes switching virtualisation platforms worth the effort, I’ve never had an opportunity to use something like Vagrant in a professional environment, the closest I’ve gotten is Kickstart scripts in Red Hat which take 10-20 minutes to get a virtual machine built, with Vagrant I’m getting machines built in a few minutes, I’m pretty impressed.
And just to tease a little Vagrant gets even better when you combine it with Ansible or Puppet.