vRealize Automation 7 – Endpoints
January 18, 2016Now that we’ve setup our new tenant, lets login as an infrastructure admin and start assigning some resources that we can use. To do this we need to start by adding an endpoint. An endpoint is anything that vRA uses to complete it’s provisioning processes. This could be a public cloud resource such as Amazon Web Services, an external orchestrator appliance, or a private cloud hosted by Hyper-V or vSphere.
In the example below, we’ll add a vSphere endpoint. Go to the Infrastructure Tab –> Credentials and then click the “New” button to add a login. Give it a name and description that will help you remember what the credentials are used for. I like to name my credentials the same as the endpoint in which they’re connecting. Enter a User Name and a password, which will be encrypted. When done, click the green check mark to save the credentials. DON’T FORGET TO DO THIS OR IT WON’T BE SAVED!
Now that we’ve got some credentials to use, go to Infrastructure Tab –> Endpoints and then click the “New” button again. Here I’m selecting Virtual –> vSphere (vCenter) because thats the type of endpoint I’m connecting to. Your mileage may vary. 
Fill out the name which should match the agents that were created during the installation. If you kept all of the defaults during the install, the first vCenter agent is named “vCenter” spelled exactly like this with the capital “C”. Give it a description and then enter the address. The address for a vCenter should be https://vcenterFQDN/sdk. Now click the ellipsis next to credentials and select the username/password combination that we created earlier.
Optional: If you’re using a product like VMware NSX or the older vCNS product, click the “Specify manager for network and security platform” and then enter an address and new set of credentials for this login.
When you’re done click save.
Summary
In this post we connected vRealize Automation 7 to a vSphere environment and we added at least one set of credentials. This should allow us to start creating fabric groups and reservations in the next few posts, but first vRA will need to do a quick discovery on the endpoint.
Thanks for sharing very detailed and step by step information for setting up VRA 7.0. I am able to setup a POC VRA environment using this guide.
Can you please help me to update how I can add Azure (Public Cloud) endpoint to my VRA 7.0.
Azure is not yet supported for vRA at this time without a PSO engagement from VMware.
Hello – great tutorial. Kind of confused though. Having issues with compute resources not showing up but you reference creating an agent “vCenter” but I don’t see that anywhere in the guide. Any assistance?
Your first endpoint should be named “vCenter” unless you changed the defaults during the install. Sometimes compute resources don’t show up right away and you may want to restart the agent service, or reboot your vRA instance. That usually does the trick. If not, check your logs in vRA’s monitoring section to see if the agent can’t find the endpoint or something. It should be logged when you do an inventory collection. Good luck.
Thanks! I rebooted VRA and the IAAS server, and the VMware vCloud Automation Center Service was not started. Started it, created an endpoint called vCenter and put the FQDN in, and now I have compute resources.
Ok – so now I am at the reservations and I see my cluster but no storage to select from. Grr.
Hi,
I have installed vra 7.0 with minimal installation. When I am trying to create credentials for endpoint, it just goes in loop and shows me “loading” infinitely. Please note that this is a first endpoint and there are no other endpoints created yet. I am getting below error in Infrastructure ->Monitoring->Log,
This exception was caught:
The attached endpoint ‘vCenter’ cannot be found.
Please don’t ask to change the name or edit the endpoint as there are no endpoints configured yet.
Please help.
OK, so you’re just adding credentials before you start adding endpoints, and you get the loop of death!? Maybe try a different browser and see if that helps. This is a new issue I’ve not run across. It might need a support request if that continues. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.
I am also getting the same error while creating credentials. Anybody found the solution so far ?
I am also getting same issue. Any one got resolution.
By default the first agent installed during the installation process is named “vCenter”. Your first endpoint should have the same name “vCenter” for your endpoints to show up correctly.
So i was able to add the vcenter endpoint no problem. Since i did the simple install in my lab, i shouldn’t need to add an orchestrator endpoint since it is embedded correct?
If you’re using “Stubs” then you’ll need to setup your vRO endpoint. If you use Event Subscriptions (recommended) or XaaS Blueprints, you don’t need to setup that endpoint. The embedded one will be used by default.
How do you add VCSA 6.5 as a vCenter endpoint (I use vRA 7.3)? I am not finding any resources about that, yet.
My lab is 7.3 connected to vCSA 6.5
endpoint is https://vcentername.domain.local/sdk and then enter your service credentials.
Tried that, it just gives an error “The vSphere agent does not exist or may not be running.”
Found it. You have to install/configure a proxy agent for each vCenter you want to connect to. An existing, already configured proxy agent (running on a Windows server) doesn’t get re-used for new vCenters. Once that step was done, creating the endpoint in vRA was straightforward.
BTW, I think they got rid of the ‘Credentials’ tab in 7.3. Or did they move it somewhere else?
Yes, each vCenter endpoint will require a new agent.
Yes in vRA 7.3 the credentials went away.
Zeev, I’m ruunning into this same issue. Could you elaborate or link to something explaining what you mean here?
Thanks.
It’s nothing special. The process you use for creating/installing a proxy agent for the first vCenter, you just have to repeat the process on a different VM to install a proxy agent for the next vCenter you want to use. One proxy/VM per vCenter.
Just to redirect the string here..Apologies guys. Can anyone point to a resource that explains how to configure vRA use vCenter as an endpoint while using that vCenter for non vRA workloads. Using vRA 7.3 with a single vCenter that supports an existing production environment.
you can add vCenters that have non-vRA workloads on them.
A fabric group should be used to separate non-vRA from vRA clusters. If you must mix them in the same cluster, a resource pool can be used for separation.