Puppet Plug-in for VMware vRealize Automation

The Puppet Plug-in for vRealize Automation (vRA) provides tools and out-of-the-box components that easily create, provision, and manage application stacks on virtual servers.

This documentation walks you through setting up a reference implementation of the plug-in, vRO, and vRA, as well as setting up a production implementation to use on an existing primary server in PE. The reference implementation is meant to be a demo and isn't designed for out-of-the-box use in production, but you can modify it to meet your needs. See Installing and configuring a reference implementation to get started with the reference implementation. If you want to start fresh and intend to use this in production, go to Getting started with vRA on an existing primary server.

Once you've completed this guide, you should have a working environment and examples with which you can develop your own Puppet code, vRO workflows, and vRA blueprints.

What the Puppet plug-in can do

With a single click, Puppet, vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), and vRealize Automation (vRealize Automation) can automatically create a VM, install the Puppet agent, autosign its certificate, add Puppet roles and profiles, install the required Puppet modules and the software they configure, and set up the server for immediate use.

If you're new to Puppet and vRO, you can use vRO and vRealize Automation to set up a live, functional Puppet managed system with much less effort than building one manually.

If you're experienced with vRO, vRealize Automation, and Puppet, you can also use this plug-in to model common Puppet workflows as vRO workflows and vRealize Automation blueprints, then deploy them just as easily as other VMs while maintaining the advantages of a Puppet managed infrastructure.

For vRealize Automation Enterprise 7.4 and newer versions of the 7.x line, adding Puppet management to blueprints is built into the vRealize Automation GUI. This plugin is still required for the integration to work. Once you have installed the plugin and  configured it with vRealize Automation 7.4  you can drag and drop Puppet management into blueprints.