Support for VMware images

[ygini]

Working from a Mac we've 4 main virtualisation solutions

• VMware Fusion
• Parallels
• Veertu
• VirtualBox

Anyone who already used VirtualBox for work on Mac know it's something to avoid. poorly integrated to macOS.

Veertu is new, so not a lot of existing setup

Parallels and Fusion are the two big player here. With a major advantage for Fusion since most corp already use VMware for their own infrastructure.

Brining back the support for VMware images for bosh could be a really nice thing to do… And not that complexe! There isn't a lot of difference to create a system image for VMware than any others…

And it's really annoying to endup on an error telling you don't support VMware for unknown reasons when we already invested in licences for VMware + Vagrant.

[dpb587-pivotal]

Thanks for raising the discussion point. For what it's worth, we currently do build stemcells (system images) for VMware environments - we publish a vSphere ESXI image available at bosh.io/stemcells, and its OVF/VMDK should be technically compatible with VMware Fusion, as is.

One of the abstractions BOSH provides is an interface between BOSH and the various IaaSes, so, in theory, the only missing piece is the VMware Fusion "CPI" which translates the BOSH VM/disk management instructions into Fusion CLI invocations. This would allow the stemcell to be locally configurable and usable by BOSH.

VirtualBox definitely has some unfortunate bugs and edge cases, but I'm not sure it's something to flat-out avoid. We and other teams use it for development and testing with general success. A VMware Fusion CPI would behave very similarly to bosh-virtualbox-cpi.

If you're interested in developing a BOSH CPI for VMware Fusion, I'd be happy to point you to a few more resources on how you might go about it.

[ygini]

@dpb587-pivotal my point wasn't to say to avoid VirtualBox support, just to say if you've to support only few because macOS isn't a huge environment for you, VMware Fusion should be the way to go.

If you already create images for ESXi, indeed, most of the work is done. Fusion work mostly the same except for VMDK file format. However, if you provide OVF instead of VMDK, it won't be an issue.

I would be happy to contribute if I understand how. Feel free to point me more resources.

[dpb587-pivotal]

I think you'll find the following links useful...

• https://bosh.io/docs/build-cpi.html - overview of the different pieces of implementing a CPI
• https://bosh.io/docs/cpi-api-v1.html - the underlying API calls that a CPI should know how to handle
• https://github.com/cppforlife/bosh-cpi-go - a golang package which may help you understand or build off the API
• https://github.com/onsi/ginkgo - a nice testing framework used by some of the golang cpis

Also, I'd recommend perusing the example clients referenced in the above links. Some are ruby, and some are golang. You can also google for the "bosh-cpi-release" phrase for a few more links.

Hope that's helpful enough to get started!

[pawingard]

Do the above links and discussion (from May 2017) still represent the 'current state' of BOSH on Fusion?