- Barry Browne @barrybrowne
- Bill Kindle @billkindle
- David Prows @Commputethis
- Jon Husen @JonHusen
- Justin Brant @JustinBrant93
- Markus Kraus @vMarkus_K
Initially, there was a couple of us who wanted to participate in the Hackathon, but we didn't really have thoughts on what to do. After some messaging around various slack communities,we found enough brainpower to warrant putting a team together, however we still did not have a solid idea. Markus asked if a team was looking for an Ansible project. Well, we didn't have an idea and we all knew what Ansible is and a couple of us had a little experience using it. So we added Markus to the team and we decided to work on an Ansible based toolkit to apply the VMware vSphere Security Configuration Guide to an existing ESXi deployment.
- 100% of recommendations should be possible (as long as it's not a permanent task like "ESXi is up to date." )
- Configurable which Recommendations should be applied
- Deliverable as Ansible Collection via Ansible Galaxy
- Some learned more about git and/or Github, like using projects, issues, and proper use of branches/merge requests
- Some of us learned how to install/run our first Ansible playbook
- We learned about Roles and Collections inside of Ansible
- Some learned how to attach issues to merge requests in Github
- For at least one of us, it was our first exposure to VMware PowerCLI
- Some enjoyed the experience of a very diverse remote team
- The first major challenge we had was having a place to do testing of the code. Some members of the team had a to build out a full ESXi cluster, with vCenter to test our code. Obviously, this took a significant amount of time since we don't do it often.
- Getting up to speed on the various technologies in play (Ansible, CentOS and git)
- Many of us either haven't used Ansible or have very limited experience with it. So we had to work our way through this. Markus was a big help with showing us how this works.
- Time Zones. We have team members spread across 3 time zones (up to 6 hours apart), 3 different countries, and 2 different continents.
We plan to open this up to the community to help maintain as updated guides come out in the future.