Technology

In the previous post we covered the architecture and setup of the vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps (also known as Houdini). In this post we’ll cover how we need to setup Houdini’s endpoints so that we can use them to release our blueprints or workflows to other instances. Remote Content Server Endpoint Setup To setup our endpoints we can use nicely packaged blueprints right in vRA. It’s pretty nice that our setup deployed some blueprints for us to use, right in the default tenant of our vRA server. Login to the vRA default tenant with your Houdini Administrator that you setup in part 1. Then go to the catalog and request the “Add Remote Content Endpoint” under the “Administration” service. A remote content server (RCS) is a vRA appliance that will cache your packages. It’s a pretty useful thing to have if you’ve got vRA appliances in different sites and you need to move vSphere VMs or other large objects over a WAN. Future releases can be copied from the remote content server instead of always copying from the source. ...

Deploying blueprints in vRealize Automation is one thing, but with all things as code, we need to be able to move this work from our test instances to development and production instances. It’s pretty important to be sure that the code being moved to a new instance is identical. We don’t want to have a user re-create the blueprints or workflows because it’s prone to user error. Luckily for us, we have a solution. VMware has the vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps which I though about nicknaming vRCSMPITDO but that didn’t really roll off the tongue. VMware previously nicknamed this product “Houdini” so for the purposes of this post, we’ll use that too! This article will kick off a few more posts on using the product but for now we’ll focus on installing it. ...

As of vRealize Automation 7.2, you can now deploy workloads to Microsoft Azure through vRA’s native capabilities. Don’t get too excited here though since the process for adding an endpoint is much different than it is for other endpoints such as vSphere or AWS. The process for Azure in vRA 7 is to leverage objects in vRealize Orchestrator to do the heavy lifting. If you know things like resource mappings and vRO objects, you can do very similar tasks in the tool. ...

Recently, I’ve been going through and updating my lab so that I’m all up to date with the latest technology. As part of this process, I’ve updated my certificates so that all of my URLs have the nice trusted green logo on them. Oh yeah, and because it’s more secure. I updated my vSphere lab to version 6.5 and moved to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) as part of my updates. However, after I replaced the default self-signed certificates I had a few new problems. Specifically, after the update, NSX wouldn’t connect to the lookup service. This is particularly annoying because as I found out later, if I’d have just left my self-signed certificates in tact, I would never have had to deal with this. I thought that I was doing the right thing for security, but VMware made it more painful for me to do the right thing. I’m hoping this gets more focus soon from VMware. ...

Cisco UCS Director Catalog Requests are the entire reason for having a cloud management platform in the first place. It’s the end user’s store for where they can request machines and services. To request a service, login to the UCS Director Portal with an account that has the “Service End-User” role. This role provides a different portal when logging in that only shows the user’s orders and catalogs and removes all of the administration options. ...

This year at AWS re:Invent Amazon announced a new service called Step Functions. According to AWS, Step Functions is an easy way to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. That pretty much sums it up! When you’ve got a series of small microservices that need to be coordinated, it can be tricky to write this code into each lambda function to call the next function. Step Functions gives you a visual editor to manage the calls to multiple Lambda functions to make your life easier. I’ve written about this before on the AHEAD blog. ...

vRealize Automation has had a different upgrade process for about every version that I can think of. The upgrade from vRA 7.1 to 7.2 is no exception, but this time you can see that some good things are happening to this process. There are fewer manual steps to do to make sure the upgrade goes smoothly and a script is now used to upgrade the IaaS Components which is a nice change from the older methods. As with any upgrade, you should read all of the instructions in the official documentation before proceeding. ...

Creating a Cisco UCS Director Catalog is a critical step because it’s what your end users will request new virtual machines and services from. There are a couple types of catalogs that will deploy virtual machines, advanced and standard. Standard selects a virtual machine template from vSphere. Advanced selects a pre-defined workflow that has been built in UCSD and then published to the catalog. Create a Standard Catalog To create a “standard” object go to the Policies drop down and select catalogs. From there click “Add”. Select a catalog type and then click “Submit”. In this example, I’ve chosen the “Standard” catalog type. ...

I’m a big fan of Terraform from Hashicorp but many organizations are using cloud management platforms like Cisco UCS Director or vRealize Automation in order to deploy infrastructure. If you read my blog often, you’ll know that I’ve got some experience with both of these products and if you’re looking to get up to speed on either of them, check out one of these links: UCS Director 6 Guide or vRealize Automation 7 Guide. But why not use Terraform with Cisco UCS Director and have the best of both worlds? ...

Creating a Cisco UCS Director Catalog is the first step to publishing services to your end users. The second step is to assign permissions. This post will show you how to assign permissions to UCS Director Catalogs. To allow users to access a catalog item they must be granted permissions. To do this, go to the Administration drop down –> Users and Groups. From there click on the “User Groups” tab and find the group which should be entitled. ...