Aria Automation Cloud Automation vCloud Automation Center

Cooking With vCloud Automation Center and Chef

By Rich Bourdeau

vCloud Automation Center does not claim to be the best tool for automating all your IT functions.  Sometimes you may have existing investments in automation tools that perform CHEF Logospecific functions for example automated deployment of application software or server configuration. In those cases vCloud Automation Center can work with your existing tools to orchestrate the end to end delivery if infrastructure, applications, and other IT services.  In addition to coordinating the delivery of the entire process, vCAC’s value added is the governance and control policies that enforce things like service entitlement, resource allocation and service level.  These policies assure that each user receives the right size resource for the task that need to be performed and that resources are allocated from predefined pools of resources intended for specific users or groups.   

vCloud Automation Center supports a number of multi-vendor tools that can be used to automate the delivery of OS and application software.  One of those tools is Chef.  If your company has an existing investment in Chef or is considering and investment in Chef, VMware’s IT as a Service Platform vCloud Automation Center will be able to work collaboratively with Chef to deliver secure scalable and high performing IT services.

VMware and Chef in Action

I’ve come across a number of articles and videos that describe in some details how to leverage these tools together to improve the efficiency of your zero touch deployment.

Our first article is from Matt Ray, a Senior Technical Evangelist with Chef.  In his blog post (Chef and VMware Integration) Matt walks through an example of calling Chef from vCAC as part of the deployment of a multi-tier application.

In his VM to Cloud Blog, Ryan Kelly, VMware Cloud Specialists, has a couple of posts which demonstrate how vCAC and Chef work better together.

For even more details, Rajesh Easwaramoorthy of VMware and Mat Ray from Chef delivered a session at the recent Chef Conf 2014  on How to Plan, Deploy, and Manage Modern Applications using vCAC and Chef.

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