Machiner

The Machiner handles creation and deletion of virtual machines in the vSphere environment from already deployed templates by the Templater.

Endpoints

The Machiner has two gRPC endpoints:

create

During the virtual machine creation phase, if there are links assigned to the VM then network devices are added to the VM and assigned to the given networks.

message DeployVirtualMachine {
    VirtualMachine virtualMachine = 1;
    MetaInfo metaInfo = 2;
}

For reference, the VirtualMachine, Configuration, MetaInfo messages are defined as follows:

message Configuration {
    uint32 cpu = 1;
    uint64 ram = 2;
}

message VirtualMachine {
    string name = 1;
    Configuration configuration = 2;
    string templateId = 3;
    repeated string links = 4;
}

message MetaInfo {
    string exerciseName = 1;
    string deploymentName = 2;
}

delete

The virtual machine is deleted from the vSphere environment.

Request

message Identifier {
    string value = 1;
}

Successful Response

message Empty {}

Configuration

The following configuration options are available for the Machiner handler:

Variable	Mandatory	Type	Rules
user	yes	string	vCenter username
password	yes	string	vCenter password
hostname	yes	string	Address of the vCenter environment
insecure	yes	bool	Enables or disables certificate verification for the vSphere client
template_folder_path	yes	string	The storage folder for templates
resource_pool_path	yes	string	The resource pool to be used
exercise_root_path	yes	string	The VM folder root path for exercises under which VMs are created
server_address	yes	string	The handlers own address and port

Example configuration file:

user: vsphere_username
password: vsphere_password
hostname: my-vsphere.net
insecure: true
template_folder_path: /Datacenter/vm/Templates/*
resource_pool_path: /Datacenter/host/Cluster/Resources/Handlers
exercise_root_path: /Datacenter/vm/Exercises
server_address: 0.0.0.0:7777