Automate configuration of your bare metal infrastructure with HPE OneView and Chef

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By Guest blogger Jared Smartt

As part of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Composable Infrastructure Partner Program, Chef is pleased to announce an exciting new integration for HPE OneView. Chef is a leading configuration management tool that enables infrastructure as code, and uses Ruby under the hood.  We’ve been working diligently on a Chef cookbook that provides an easy way for configuring HPE OneView-managed physical infrastructure directly from Chef.  This builds on the Chef Provisioning Driver for HPE OneView that we released last year, which enables bare metal provisioning. 

Typically, configuration management tools like Chef are used to automate configuration and installation of software on top of a running machine with an OS.  The Chef cookbook for HPE OneView takes configuration management capabilities to a whole new level. Now, using the same tool, you can define your bare metal hardware in code alongside your application stack. 

If you haven't used configuration management tools like Chef before, one important concept to understand is that it's a lot different than just running a bunch of scripts.  Instead, it's declarative; only resources that do not match the definition are updated.  Using the HPE OneView cookbook, the same concept applies.  You define your hardware configuration in code, and then it's the Chef client's job to ensure that things are as they should be.   This works because HPE OneView provides a clean REST API for complete control and visibility of your bare-metal infrastructure, using the same semantics you expect from the public cloud.  A unified REST API enables bare-metal server, storage, networking, and OS deployment. Bare-metal machine templates and profiles simplify management at scale and focus on provisioning up to the OS, which makes it a perfect fit for Chef to layer on top.

The cookbook is actually a fairly simple wrapper around the Ruby SDK for HPE OneView that was released earlier this year. The diagram below shows how the Chef client uses these libraries to communicate with the HPE OneView API. 

Using this cookbook, Chef users specify the types of infrastructure needed (e.g., an HPE server blade), the way they need to be configured (e.g., attached to this storage pool and connected to these network sets), and the action to take, like ‘create if missing’. These configurations are saved in Chef recipes that can then be applied to pools of resources as needed. The cookbook allows complex infrastructure configurations to be fully automated without requiring complex choreography across servers, storage and networking APIs.

You can get started today. The code for the HPE OneView cookbook is open source and freely available on GitHub  and on the Chef Supermarket.  And if you are looking for assistance, experts from HPE’s Datacenter Care – Infrastructure Automation practice are ready to provide advice, best practices and coaching for your operations and development teams. 

Click here for more information on the HPE Composable Infrastructure Partner Program.

Click here for the Chef announcement on certification of HPE OneView and iLO cookbooks.

Click here for more information on HPE Composable Infrastructure.

See you this week at ChefConf!

Jared

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