Puppet provide a really great learning experience free of charge for everyone in the form of the Puppet Learning VM. The VM includes Puppet Enterprise, Puppet Server, Bolt and a bunch of virtual clients (thanks to incorporating Docker) for you to use to become more familiar with the Server to Client relationships.
Out of the box, the download is in OVA format however, it is not supported on vSphere straight out of the box, since the VM has been made with desktop virtualisation products (such as VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion, for example) in mind. In my case, I wanted to run it on my home vSphere environment. Thankfully it is pretty each to resolve.
- Import the OVA into VMware Workstation.
- Once imported, select the virtual machine, click the VM menu, then Manage and finally Change Hardware Compatibility.
- Select the version of ESX / vSphere that you are using.
- Once the conversion has taken place, you can use Workstation to import the updated VM into vSphere.
You can now power on and follow the onscreen instructions to get started with Puppet
