GitLab Runner Fleeting plugin for VMware vSphere (seeking community contributions)
Overview
This issue is for soliciting community contributions for the development of a GitLab Runner Fleeting plugin for VMware vSphere, specifically vCenter Server and ESXi.
Background
Some customers host their runners using VMware vSphere on-premise. These customers need an automated mechanism to provision an ephemeral virtual machine on vSphere to run a GitLab CI job in either containers on the Linux OS or in the shell in Windows.
The GitLab Next Runner Autoscaling Architecture introduced a plugin system interface with the goal of enabling community contributions for plugin development for other compute virtualization platforms (on-premise, cloud delivered) aside from AWS EC2, GCP, Azure.) In the plugin architecture, a runner (acting only as a runner manager) runs jobs remotely on a runner worker machine instance.
Proposal
Develop a GitLab Runner Fleeting plugin for creating and deleting virtual machines on VMware vSphere.