DevOps Series - Setup Environment using Virtual Machines

We are going to publish series of courses under DevOps

What you'll learn:

• Provision Baremetal Servers from Infrastructure Providers such as OVH
• Install Centos 7 Original kernel after disabling RAID
• Setup Remote Desktop using GNOME and Tiger VNC Server
• Understand Virtualization tools and Vagrant
• Setup Vagrant on top of KVM with libvirt plugin
• Customize Vagrantfile to launch multiple virtual machines using Ruby

We are glad to announce DevOps Series where we will be publishing several courses over period of time.

This is the first course in the series where we will be covering setting up environment using Virtual Machines by leveraging Vagrant.

Why OVHand Baremetal Server?

• In most of the enterprises, working professionals might have access to a physical server or powerful virtual machine with hyper virtualization enabled

• To get to that state, I have rented server from OVHand setup Centos. It also helps professionals who got funding from their employer to learn newer technologies. They can rent the server, setup OS and then go with rest of the steps.

• If you start this course with a server with root access in hand, you can skip some of the topics and directly jump on to setting up Vagrant.

Why Virtual Machines?

• Most of the DevOps tools require multiple servers for hands on practice.

• Using Virtual Machines is highly productive way of learning most of the DevOps tools.

• Once you have virtual machines, you can learn many technologies with hands on experience.

  • Server automation tools like - ansible, puppet, chef etc

  • Container technologies like Docker

  • Orchestrating containers using Kubernetes

  • Setting up environment using Openstack

  • Creating CI/CD pipelines

  • Building Hadoop Clusters etc

Why Vagrant?

• One of the challenge of using Virtual Machines is that, setting up Virtual Machines and networking them will take time.

• Vagrant provide capability to add multiple virtual machines as a group.

• It uses ruby script and we can program quickly and effectively to set up Virtual Machines the way we want.

• Once we learn how to customize Vagrantfile after understanding ruby scripting, we should be able to set up multiple virtual machines in few minutes.