Mastering CloudForms Automation

Chapter 38. Service Reconfiguration

Our virtual machine or instance provisioning workflows have so far created new ready-configured virtual machines, or virtual machines integrated with Satellite 6 so that a Puppet configuration can be applied (see Chapter 28).

In these cases we must log in to two separate systems to get our provisioned and configured servers into operation. We log in to the CloudForms WebUI to start the provisioning operation and a second WebUI for the configuration management platform (such as Satellite) to set or reset the configuration parameters.

When we provision new virtual machines as services, however, we can consolidate the provisioning and configuration functions in a single user interface. We can set initial configuration parameters in a service dialog and then mark a service as Reconfigurable to allow these parameters to be updated from the same CloudForms service dialog.

This duel use of a service dialog for both initial configuration and reconfiguration works well if we are using a configuration management tool such as Satellite 6, and Puppet. We can specify Puppet smart class parameters in our service dialog that can be passed to Foreman and used to override the statically defined Puppet class parameters.

Reconfigure Entry Point

So far when we have created our service catalog items, we have specified a provisioning entry point state machine to handle the provisioning workflow for the new service. There are two other entry points that we can optionally ...