Book Image

LEARNING PUPPET

By : Jussi Heinonen
Book Image

LEARNING PUPPET

By: Jussi Heinonen

Overview of this book

Puppet is a cross-platform, open source configuration management utility, which runs on various Unix, Linux, and Windows Microsoft platforms. It allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control of what you do to each node, and also when and how you do it. You’ll be able to build and manage development, test, and production environments independently without requiring previous system administration experience. Learning Puppet is a step-by-step guide on how to get started with Puppet development and use Puppet modules as the building blocks to deploy production-ready application cluster in virtual environment. You will begin with the installation of development environment on the VirtualBox hypervisor and Puppet Learning VM that will be used as the platform for testing and development of Puppet modules. Next, you will learn how to manage virtual machines and snapshots effectively and enhance the development experience with advanced VirtualBox features. Later the book will focus on Puppet module development in detail. You will be guided through the process of utilizing existing modules that are available in the public module repository, write your own modules and use them to deploy a real-world web application that includes features such as monitoring and load balancing. You will then learn to scale your environment and turn your static configuration into a dynamic one through stored configurations and PuppetDB. Finally, the book will provide you with practical advice on Puppet troubleshooting and managing your environment with the wealth of features provided by the Puppet Enterprise console.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Building the load balancer node


Now we know how the cluster will look once the load balancer node has been added to the cluster. To create the load balancer node, we will first create a new virtual machine clone that will be used as the development environment for the load balancer Puppet module development. Let's get on with it then.

Cloning a new virtual machine for the load balancer

If you have any virtual machines running at the moment, I'd recommend to shut them down now to reduce the memory usage on the host computer. We will begin by creating a new clean virtual machine for the load balancer module development using the following steps:

  1. Select the virtual machine puppet-agent.

  2. Click the Snapshots button.

  3. Choose the puppet-agent-web snapshot.

  4. Click the Clone button.

  5. Provide a name for the new virtual machine, for example, puppet-agent-loadbalancer and tick the box Reinitialize the MAC address of all network cards.

  6. Click on Next.

  7. In the Clone type view, select Linked clone.

  8. Click on Clone.

  9. You...