Testing on Physical Machines with kitchen-static 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.
Instant Clones with kitchen-vcenter 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.
Guest Operations and kitchen-vcenter 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.
Linked Clones with kitchen-vcenter 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.
Target Mode with Serial Devices 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?
The kitchen-vcenter Driver 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.
The kitchen-ec2 Driver Within the Chef ecosystem, Test Kitchen is one of the most useful tools. It offers the possibility to quickly test cookbooks in different OS environments on machines with a limited lifetime. That way, you can check if your fancy recipes work the same on RedHat, Centos 6 and Ubuntu. As speed is king, this fast feedback motivates more for early testing and reduces the amount of bugs found in production.
Custom Resource Diffs in Chef If you are writing custom resources regularly, you might have been annoyed by a general “diff” functionality in Chef. In this post we will work on some snippets to make this possible
