DevOps Megathread: what you need and how we can help!

john.c

@olivierlambert Another useful item to aid in development processes and IaC operations. Is when using GitHub Copilot an MCP Server which will interface with the Vates VMS stack, so the agent can get context related to requests (queries). That way its responses can be properly grounded in the context of the stack, as well as the configuration, setup of the Vates VMS installation and its available resources.

Can the IaC team work on this, though may need other teams help?

nathanael-h

@john.c Why not, can you share what would be the first tools to support and your use cases? I assume that if you are working in VSCode you might be useing some infrastructure as code, like Terraform or Pulumi or Ansible, isn't? In these case do you also have some related MCP servers enabled?

john.c

@nathanael-h said in DevOps Megathread: what you need and how we can help!:

@john.c Why not, can you share what would be the first tools to support and your use cases? I assume that if you are working in VSCode you might be useing some infrastructure as code, like Terraform or Pulumi or Ansible, isn't? In these case do you also have some related MCP servers enabled?

@nathanael-h Pulumi for the infrastructure as code, with the code held on a private GitHub repository.

To aid in writing the IaC code as well as helping with provisioning VMs etc.

As well as during development of full stack website projects.

The appropriate servers are already enabled and configured, for GitHub Copilot use.

Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot.

john.c

@manilx I have proposed to the IaC team of Vates, a MCP Server for Vates VMS. Which can be used by GitHub Copilot or similar, if used when doing IaC etc.

Cyrille

Terraform Provider - Release 0.35.1

The new version fixes bugs when creating a VM from a template #361:

All existing disks in the template are used if they are declared in the TF plan.
All unused disks in the template are deleted to avoid inconsistency between the TF plan and the actual state.
It is no longer possible to resize existing template disks to a smaller size (fixes potential source of data loss).

The release: https://github.com/vatesfr/terraform-provider-xenorchestra/releases/tag/v0.35.1

Cyrille

The release v0.35.0 improves the logging of both the Xen Orchestra golang SDK and the Terraform Provider.

Now it should be easier to read the log using TF_LOG_PROVIDER=DEBUG (see the provider documentation)

Cyrille

Terraform Provider v0.36.0 and Pulumi Provider v2.3.0

Read and expose boot_firmware on template data-source by @sakaru in #381
Fixes VM creation from multi-disks template:
- All existing disks in the template are used if they are declared in the plan.
- All unused disks in the template are deleted to avoid inconsistency between the plan and the actual state.
- It is no longer possible to resize existing template disks to a smaller size (fixes potential source of data loss).
- Order of existing disk matches the declaration order in the plan

Terraform provider release: https://github.com/vatesfr/terraform-provider-xenorchestra/releases/tag/v0.36.0

Pulumi provider release: https://github.com/vatesfr/pulumi-xenorchestra/releases/tag/v2.3.0

Cyrille

Terraform provider release v0.36.1

Fix for VM creation from templates with >=3 disks

olivierlambert

cichy

Prioritization of VM startup AND shutdown sequencing! PLEASE - in the GUI (XO). So - without code - I can finally shutdown my servers accessing DB's prior to shutting down the DB server vm's themselves thereby saving myself from table corruption.

john.c

@cichy said in DevOps Megathread: what you need and how we can help!:

Prioritization of VM startup AND shutdown sequencing! PLEASE - in the GUI (XO). So - without code - I can finally shutdown my servers accessing DB's prior to shutting down the DB server vm's themselves thereby saving myself from table corruption.

@cichy In the past it was recommended to do this with an vApp and script. However this means editing the script or configuration file (if one’s created for the script). Which doesn’t make it as easy as the method, used by VMware ESXi for configuring the order and enabling the capacity.

Xen Orchestra and/or XCP-ng could really do with an UI (and API) based method of setting up and managing the VM boot and shutdown order.

Cyrille

Terraform provider release v0.37.0

Enables the secure boot parameter for the VM resource

Terraform provider release: https://github.com/vatesfr/terraform-provider-xenorchestra/releases/tag/v0.37.0

Cyrille

Hi here,

We have released documentation with our recommendations for those who want to run Talos in Xen Orchestra.

It is available in the official Sidero Labs documentation: Platform specific installation > Virtualized Platforms > Xen Orchestra

We are currently working on providing an example of a Talos cluster that has been created using Terraform.

Have fun

olivierlambert

Congrats!

afk

@Cyrille said in DevOps Megathread: what you need and how we can help!:

Hi here,

We have released documentation with our recommendations for those who want to run Talos in Xen Orchestra.

It is available in the official Sidero Labs documentation: Platform specific installation > Virtualized Platforms > Xen Orchestra

We are currently working on providing an example of a Talos cluster that has been created using Terraform.

Have fun

Nice ! Thank you for this.

Fwiw, I started to work on a PoC deployment of a talos cluster this summer and managed to do the full process with pulumi. I'll probably migrate to opentofu when I have everything setup as I want to clean things up.

The whole install and k8s bootstrap takes 2-3 minutes to deploy a 3 nodes control plane and 3 workers from start to finish. You even get the machine configs, kubeconfig and talosconfig as outputs. Then, I deployed fluxcd manually but you could even automate that in the deployment.

Overall, its really impressive and quite easy once you understand the way talos works. Highly recommended !

Cyrille

@afk Nice! I haven't tried Pulumi yet. Does Talos have a provider for it?

I'm working on improving the CCM to make it work with Talos. Especially the cloud-node-label-sync controller (as the cloud-controller is the Talos one) to get the XO topology in the node labels.

afk

@Cyrille said in DevOps Megathread: what you need and how we can help!:

@afk Nice! I haven't tried Pulumi yet. Does Talos have a provider for it?

I'm working on improving the CCM to make it work with Talos. Especially the cloud-node-label-sync controller (as the cloud-controller is the Talos one) to get the XO topology in the node labels.

Yes there is a provider for it: https://www.pulumi.com/registry/packages/talos/

I guess its the auto-generated provider from the terraform one because I had some type checking errors in some places, but using python I could ignore that... I don't know if it has been fixed since.
I remember reading some terraform examples on blogs to write the pulumi config so converting one to the other should be straightforward. Unfortunately, I can't publish what I wrote because its quite messy but feel free to ask if you have some blockers.

The CCM would be nice to have indeed ! Good luck on that.