Basically we want to automate virtual machine creation from ISO. As in one of our project we get custom ISO (appliances with application pre-installed in OS) released from time to time. So we need to use these ISO for further testing or setting up development environments.
So we are looking for an automated deployment tools through which we can create VM on Esxi hosts.
The use case is given below
- We get new ISO and say uploaded in datastore location.
- Now using some tool like chef or puppet (or some other tool) we trigger pro-vising of VM.
We can't have predefined VMDK or OVFA (as some tutorial talk about them) as every new ISO will have some new changes so it like always creating a new VM as we may need to create some older version appliance machine for some issues.
So any thoughts how I can achive the same.
Best Answer
'scuse me but that doesn't make sense. You say that your software provider can't deliver an OVF/OVA "as every new ISO will have some new changes". Every new OVF/OVA they deliver to you would have this changes, too.
If you really want to accept ISOs and create new VMs every time there's a lot of ways. You want to automate the creation of a VM + mapping an installation ISO to it, right? Well, you can script it (afair there's official support to do this with java, power shell, perl, ruby and python but you can generate your own client by using the API-WSDL) or you make use of vCenter Orchestrator.
edit: libvirt/virsh could also work.