After introducing how to work with physical machines and Test Kitchen last time, we will look at a feature to allow central orchestration of available machines.
This article shows how to work with Test Kitchen on physical machines using the kitchen-static Driver. If you need to deliver a product (bundle of server and software) instead of just configuration, some tasks cannot be run on virtual machines alone but need testing on actual hardware.
Over the last few posts we optimized our kitchen-vcenter setups and are stuck with the usual, long boot times of Windows systems. Surprisingly, VMware introduced a feature which can help us get rid of those. For good.
In this part of the blog series, we will look on how to speed up IP discovery of new machines with a little-known feature of the VMware Tools.
Quickly starting new Test Kitchen machines is one of the main concerns for getting the desired feedback cycles in cookbook development. While machines get created as a full clone by default, the kitchen-vcenter driver offers a better alternative.
Usually, you will work with SSH or WinRM to connect to remote nodes and configure them. Those standard protocols bring along all the perks of a modern network connection: Encryption, Authentication, File transfers, etc
But what if you have a device without network connectivity?
While many companies already rely on some Cloud for all of their IT systems, bigger enterprise customers often have own data centers which consist of thousands of virtual machines. Under these circumstances, it is often not desirable to only test Chef cookbooks on AWS or Azure, but doing this in the real environment is a better idea. The kitchen-vcenter driver allows you to harness the power of your own IT systems.
