BigV is a private dedicated virtual machine platfom provided by Bytemark,

This terraform provider allows the management of machines on that platform.

See BigV prices, Resource definitions and API documentation for configuration options to resource parameters.

If the os you provide is not none, then terraform will wait for the imaging to finish before reporting completion. That should be one in under 3 minutes depending on your distribution. Your distribution must expose an ssh daemon on port 22, since that's how we define "alive".

If your os is none, then we either wait for the VM to be processed by bigv if power_on is false, or we wait for it to be powered up if power_on is true.

If you change cores or memory, the VM will be restarted. It's always necessary for increases. Strictly bigv can downsize without restarts, but we've noticed that decreasing RAM nearly always ends up inconsistent in the VM. e.g. decreasing to 1GiB gives you 750MiB until you restart.

• account

  Bigv account name.

• user

  Bigv Username

• password

  Your bigv password. Yubikey is not yet supported. Patches welcome.

• name

  The VM name

• group

  The group name for the server.

  Defaults to default.

• zone

  The zone to put the server in. Currently this is machester or york. See definitions.

  Defaults to york.

• cores

  How many cores to allocate. Note that cores must be allocated 1 per 4GiB of RAM. So 1-3GiB = 1 core, 4-7GiB = 2 core.

  If you don't specify cores, but do specify memory, you'll be assigned the correct cores for the memory.

  Defaults to 1.

• memory

  How much RAM to allocate in MiB.

  If you don't specify mmeory byt do specify cores, you'll be allocated the minimal memory for the core count. e.g. 1GiB for 1 core, 4GiB for 2 cores, etc.

  Defaults to 1024.

• os

  Short name of operating system to image. See: Resource definitions Common options are: jessie, vivid and none

  Defaults to none.

• ipv4

• ipv6

  IP address to allocate. We recommend ips should be specified because it eases the burden on bytemark's allocation process, and should allow concurrent imaging without deadlocks.

• disc_size

  Disc size in MiB. More options in the API are not yet supported, such as storage grade.

  Defaults to 25600

• power_on

  Whether or not the machine should be powered. Note that if reboot is true then setting power_on to false just reboots the VM immediately. See Bigv power documentation

  Defaults to true.

• reboot

  Whether or not the machine should be rebooted automatically when powered down. See Bigv power documentation

  Defaults to true.

• ssh_public_key

  SSH public key to be created on the VM. Can be multiple keys.

• firstboot_script

  A script to be run on first boot only by the bigv system itself. Useful for provisioning, especially if terraform remote-exec or file provisioners don't work.

• root_password

  The root password assigned to this vm.

variables.tf:

variable "account" {
  default = "myaccount"
}
variable "user" {
  default = "myuser"
}
// Probably best to supply this interactively
variable "password" { }

provider.tf:

provider "bigv" {
  account  = "${var.account}"
  user     = "${var.user}"
  password = "${var.password}"
}

resources.tf:

resource "bigv_vm" "tf01" {
  name    = "tf01"
  ipv4    = "49.48.12.201"
  ipv6    = "1996:41c8:20:5ed::3:1"
  cores   = 1
  memory  = 1024
  os      = "vivid"
  group   = "default"
  zone    = "manchester"
}
 
resource "bigv_vm" "tf02" {
  name    = "tf02"
  ipv4    = "49.48.12.202"
  ipv6    = "1996:41c8:20:5ed::3:2"
  cores   = 2
  memory  = 4096
  os      = "trusty"
  group   = "vlan1519"
  zone    = "york"
}
 
resource "bigv_vm" "tf03" {
  name    = "tf03"
  ipv4     = "49.48.12.203"
  ipv6    = "1996:41c8:20:5ed::3:3"
  cores   = 1
  memory  = 1024
  os      = "none"
} 

And then just:

terraform plan
terraform apply
terraform refresh
terraform destroy

Terraform commands support TF_LOG=level environment variables:

TF_LOG=DEBUG terraform apply

This provider will be fairly verbose.