Using Terraform to create IBM AIX 7.2 LPARs in the Skytap Cloud
Terraform is fantastic, it has a shallow learning curve and is extremely well documented. So I was delighted when I heard that my colleagues at Skytap were releasing an official provider, having used it in anger at AWS and seeing how customers were drawn to it.
Skytap works by creating templates that can contain some (or all) of the virtual machines, LPARs, networks, storage and management tools of an application or applications. You can one-button deploy these templates in about 45 seconds, and you’ll have an entire Enterprise app with however many TBs of data etc ready to go. Because of that Skytap had immutable infrastructure before it was cool, but with the addition of Terraform for deployment, users can start to deploy more traditional Enterprise applications using their cloud native toolchain.
As the provider develops, and time allows, I’ll start to produce more guidance and ‘worked examples’ of how to use Terraform with Skytap.
But for starters, though the script below is pretty simple, it just creates two LPARs in an environment and adds another network to be used for iSCSI mounts.
The script selects an existing template, deploys it, adds a new network and then creates an additional LPAR.
