Automating HAProxy VM deployment with 3-NIC configuration using PowerCLI

When deploying the HAProxy VM as part of vSphere with Tanzu, customers have the option of deploying the HAProxy VM using either a 2-NIC or 3-NIC configuration. The default OVF Deployment Option is the 2-NIC design called "Default" and the 3-NIC design is called "Frontend".

From an Automation point of view, you can use either OVFTool or PowerCLI to automate the deployment. For a 2-NIC example, you can refer to my Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script. However, for the 3-NIC example, a few folks were running into some issues when using PowerCLI for the automation.

The main issue is that because the default OVF Deployment Option is the 2-NIC design (Default), the two additional OVF properties frontend_ip and frontend_gateway is basically hidden when processing the OVF properties when PowerCLI.

Note: You can view these optional properties by running the following OVFTool command: ovftool --X:enableHiddenProperties vmware-haproxy-v0.1.8.ova

Even if you specified the "Frontend" OVF Deployment Option, PowerCLI does not seem to have the logic to retrieve the other optional parameters and hence can not be set as part of the initial deployment.

A workaround to this problem is to simply update these OVF parameters after the initial import but prior to powering on the VM. I had previously blogged about using PowerCLI to update existing OVF properties and we will borrow from that script to demonstrate how to automate HAProxy VM using 3-NIC configuration.

I have created an example PowerCLI script called deploy_3nic_haproxy.ps1 which you will need to update the variables to match your deployment.