vmpooler provides configurable 'pools' of instantly-available (running) virtual machines.
At Puppet, Inc. we run acceptance tests on thousands of disposable VMs every day. Dynamic cloning of VM templates initially worked fine for this, but added several seconds to each test run and was unable to account for failed clone tasks. By pushing these operations to a backend service, we were able to both speed up tests and eliminate test failures due to underlying infrastructure failures.
vmpooler requires the following Ruby gems be installed:
It also requires that a Redis server exists somewhere, as this is the datastore used for vmpooler's inventory and queueing services.
The following YAML configuration sets up two pools, debian-7-i386
and debian-7-x86_64
, which contain 5 running VMs each:
---
:vsphere:
server: 'vsphere.company.com'
username: 'vmpooler'
password: 'swimsw1msw!m'
:redis:
server: 'redis.company.com'
:config:
logfile: '/var/log/vmpooler.log'
:pools:
- name: 'debian-7-i386'
template: 'Templates/debian-7-i386'
folder: 'Pooled VMs/debian-7-i386'
pool: 'Pooled VMs/debian-7-i386'
datastore: 'vmstorage'
size: 5
- name: 'debian-7-x86_64'
template: 'Templates/debian-7-x86_64'
folder: 'Pooled VMs/debian-7-x86_64'
pool: 'Pooled VMs/debian-7-x86_64'
datastore: 'vmstorage'
size: 5
See the provided YAML configuration example, vmpooler.yaml.example, for additional configuration options and parameters.
Template set-up is left as an exercise to the reader. Somehow, either via PXE, embedded bootstrap scripts, or some other method -- clones of VM templates need to be able to set their hostname, register themselves in your DNS, and be resolvable by the vmpooler application after completing the clone task and booting up.
vmpooler provides an API and web front-end (dashboard) on port :4567
. See the provided YAML configuration example, vmpooler.yaml.example, to specify an alternative port to listen on.
vmpooler provides a REST API for VM management. See the API documentation for more information.
A dashboard is provided to offer real-time statistics and historical graphs. It looks like this:
Graphite is required for historical data retrieval. See the provided YAML configuration example, vmpooler.yaml.example, for details.
- The vmpooler_client.py CLI utility provides easy access to the vmpooler service. The tool is cross-platform and written in Python.
- vmfloaty is a ruby based CLI tool and scripting library written in ruby.
- vagrant-vmpooler Use Vagrant to create and manage your vmpooler instances.
vmpooler is distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for more details.