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The chef-repo for Windows-based infrastructure PoC

The aim of this Proof of Concept project is to see how Chef deals with provisioning Windows-specific environment in typical app Use Case. And then scale it.

  • AS a user I WANT to increase employer salary AND persist it into database
  • AS a returning user I WANT to see current salary value fetched from redis cache

If you're wondering why the heck I'm using locally chef-server when I could go with chef-zero instead, it is because I would like to play with environment more closer to production and play around with this in isolated environment.

Architecture

  • load balancer
    • Application Request Routing
  • application servers
    • WCF Service as managed Windows Service
    • ASP.NET MVC Web App
    • Redis
  • sqlserver - SQL Server 2012 Express

PoC Infrastructure

Pre-requisites

Steps to setup environment

Prepare Windows Server 2012 box

This is one time operation. To simplify it I recommend to use existing Packer template from joefitzgerald/packer-windows. Clone the repo and run: packer build windows_2012_r2.json. After it's finished in the same dir you will get windows_2012_r2_virtualbox.box which can be imported to Vagrant using vagrant box add win_server_2012 windows_2012_r2_virtualbox.box.

If you need different Widndows-based distributions check closer that repo.

That template uses in the hood OpenSSH to prepare box. If this doesn't fit to your requirements you can:

FTR Chef itself is using WinRM, as well as vagrant though prepared Vagrantfile

Build Chef Server

Steps below will build and configure Chef Sever 12 and artefacts repository. Scripts are using installation of version 12.0.8, if you want to use different one change install_chef_server.sh before proceed further.

  1. Build chef-server using vagrant up chef (this will take a while). Please note: while provisioning script downloads RPM package (~470MiB) which is stored next to Vagrantfile, so there is no need re-downloading the package when you destroy and build VM again.
  2. Run knife ssl fetch to download private cert from chef-server. Verify if it works fine by running knife ssl check and knife client list
  3. You can sign in on https://10.0.1.8/ with credentials: frakti / JaCierpieDole
  4. Artefacts repository is available under http://10.0.1.8:23000/ and points to artefacts dir

Build application infrastructure

  • run ./upload.sh (OS-independent script)
  • Create SQL Server instance by running vagrant up sql (issue #1 and #2)
  • Create Load Balancer instance by run vagrant up lb
  • Create Application Server instances by running vagrant up iis1 iis2 (issue #1)

Unfortunately there are still idempotency (Windows-specific) issues, and few nodes won't be provisioned completely at first run. For more details check Issues below.

Application will be available under http://10.0.1.10/poc/

The app as well as static page on root (http://10.0.1.10/) show response origin to visualize working load balancing.

Issues

#1 When adding new user to Administrators group, provisioning fails at fist time with an error:

No mapping between account names and security IDs was done.

Temporary what you need to do is invoke vagrant reload <node_name> --provision

#2 While provisioning SQL Server you will get an error:

The specified module 'SqlPs' was not loaded because no valid module file was found in any module directory.

Solution for this is to run provisioning again: vagrant provision sql.

TODOs

  • Fix idempotentcy issues (#1 and #2)
  • Write some tests.
  • Use Chef Search instead of hardcoded IP in db connection string.
  • Disable maintenance mode on VMs while provisioning - it slows down machine performance.

Contributors

A big thanks to @MSledzinski who prepared artefacts for this PoC (MSledzinski/deploy-poc).

Feel free to sent pull requests.