Over the past couple of months, I have published several posts about Configuration drift and tools like Vester and DSC Resources for VMware. Because Vester and DSC Resources for VMware serve the same goal, let us review what these tools have in common and see some of the differences.
Some topics; general information about the tool, configuration of the tool, the tool in daily operations, performance and a summary.
Introduction
Both tools are built with PowerShell. Vester has been on the market for the longest time and dates from 2017. Vester comes as a PowerShell module and depends on two other modules; Pester and PowerCLI. Vester consists of three parts;
- Commands that do the actual work, like creating configuration files, verifying the actual configuration and do remediation in case the actual configuration does not match the desired confguration.
- Set of Test files. Each test file contains code that checks and applies a configuration item.
- Config files, are key-value pairs with the desired values of the configuration items. Some examples: NTP settings, DNS servers, etc.
Desired State Configuration (DSC) was introduced in PowerShell 4 and brings a declarative model for the configuration of Windows Servers. DSC can copy files, edit the registry, install Windows features and components. After initial configuration, DSC can also test the desired configuration and if necessary perform remediation.
DSC Resources are what can be configured on a Windows server, but today not only on Windows Servers! DSC Resources for VMware was first released in December 2018. Instead of Windows servers, these resources can configure ESXi hosts and vCenter Servers, although the first edition had only a few resources. The second edition, released in June 2019 offered considerably more resources.
Both tools are available in the PowerShell Gallery and can be found in Github.
Adventures in a Virtual World 