Ever want to try Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Nutanix?

So I can imagine, if you find yourself here, you want to try Terraform but don’t really know where to start or what to do.

Not an issue. This post should be fairly short and straight forward, here’s is what we’re going to do:

1. Install Terraform
2. Create a directory for Terraform files
3. Grab important information from your Nutanix cluster
4. Create a Terraform config file
5. Deploy the same config file
6. Grab a beer

I’m going to assume that you already have Brew installed. If not, this is an easy way to install. (Following install instructions are on MacOS, if you use Linux go here.)

In your terminal, begin with the simple: brew tap hashicorp/tap
This will install the Hashicorp Repository for all Homebrew packages.
Now, follow this up with brew install hashicorp/tap/terraform
Lastly, don’t forget to verify if it installed correctly (hint: terraform version).

Ok! Now we’re cooking. From here, and for better organization, create a new directory where you’ll have all your Terraform files.

Now that we have Terraform installed, we need to initial our directory and designate what provider we’re going to use. In this case, we want to create a provider.tf file to tell Terraform to install the plugin necessary. In your terminal, run vi provider.tf
Note: You can use any .tf file for this

terraform {
  required_version = ">= 0.13"
  ## Define the required version of the provider
  required_providers {
    nutanix = {
      source  = "terraform-providers/nutanix"
      version = "~> 1.1"
    }
  }
}

Save, and run terraform init to initialize your directory for use.

Begin to create your main .tf file that will define your end state in Nutanix. I’m providing a template, however, you should check out the Nutanix resource on Terraform.io. You are welcome to download my template here.

Before we start editing, we need some important data from your cluster. SSH into any of your CVMs and locate this info:
1. ISO Image UUID
2. Storage Container UUID
3. Network UUID
4. Cluster UUID (Can access from Prism Settings under Cluster Details)

ISO Image UUID = acli image.list

Storage Container UUID = ncli container ls

Network UUID = acli net.list


With the UUID’s from the information above, we can now create our config file. You’ll need to start off with the provider and important information. Also, you can get the template from my Github.

provider "nutanix" {
 username = "<user_name>"  #Prism username and password
 password = "<password>"
 endpoint = "<IP_address>"  #prism virtual IP address as an endpoint
 insecure = true
}

Below that….

resource "nutanix_virtual_machine" "MyTestVM_TF" {
 name = "MyTestVM-TF"
 description = "Created with Terraform"
 provider = nutanix
 cluster_uuid = "0005ae5b-547e-4129-0000-0000000076a8" #Cluster UUID you pulled earlier
  num_vcpus_per_socket = 1
  num_sockets = 1
  memory_size_mib = 2048

  nic_list {
     # subnet_reference is saying, which VLAN/network do you want to attach here?
     subnet_uuid = "e6d59992-3323-4e39-8364-9a0603597c50" #Your network UUID
   }

  disk_list {
  # data_source_reference in the Nutanix API refers to where the source for
  # the disk device will come from. Could be a clone of a different VM or a
  # image like we're doing here
  # ssh into the CVM and run: acli image.list
  data_source_reference = {
   kind = "image"
   uuid = "1c88dd88-b9be-4961-9fd6-5c581d6e6d75" #Specific ISO for your deployment
    }

  device_properties {
    disk_address = {
   device_index = 0
   adapter_type = "IDE"
    }

    device_type = "DISK"
  }
    disk_size_mib   = 100000                # Pay attention to the size here
    disk_size_bytes = 104857600000

    # ssh into cvm and run: ncli container list
    storage_config {
      storage_container_reference {
        kind = "storage_container"
        uuid = "04c64ac7-c695-4350-b77d-61d5285c8fb0" # Conatiner you'd like to use
    }
   }

   }
}

output "ip_address" {
  value = nutanix_virtual_machine.MyTestVM_TF.nic_list_status.0.ip_endpoint_list[0]["ip"]
}

Take a few minutes and begin to input that data you collected from your CVMs. You’ll see we’ll need to put this all in a Resource of “nutanix_virtual_machine”. The “output” will be the IP address of your Terraform created VM.

So with your new file created, I want you to run the command terraform apply.

Go grab a beer, this may take a minute.

That’s it.

In this example, we installed Terraform, initialized a directory, and deployed a customized file for deploying one VM.