Vcac on The IT Hollow

Getting Started with vRealize Code Stream

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 14:05:22 +0000

vRealize Code Stream is a tool that is used to operationalize infrastructure code blueprints for release management. Code Stream plugs into vRealize Automation and includes a testing framework though Jenkins and vRealize Orchestrator as well as using JFrog Artifactory and Xenon for storing artifacts. This post is used to organize several blog posts on helping you to get started with vRealize Code Stream and Houdini.

Setting up Code Stream and Jenkins

Setting up Code Stream and Artifactory

Installing vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Configuring Endpoints for vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Using vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Unit Testing with vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Official Documentation:

vRealize Code Stream Information Center VMware vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps Installation Guide

Getting Started with vRealize Automation Course

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 15:09:05 +0000

If you’re trying to get started with vRealize Automation and don’t know where to get started, you’re in luck. Pluralsight has just released my course on “Getting Started with vRealize Automation 7”, which will give you a great leg up on your new skills. In this course you’ll learn to install the solution, configure the basics, connect it to your vSphere environment and publish your first blueprints. The course will explain why you’d want to go down the path of using vRA 7 in the first place and how to use the solution.

Upgrade from vRA from 7.1 to 7.2

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 15:00:25 +0000

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.

Add Custom Items to vRealize Automation

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 14:14:41 +0000

vRealize Automation lets us publish vRealize Orchestrator workflows to the service catalog, but to get more functionality out of these XaaS blueprints, we can add the provisioned resources to the items list. This allows us to manage the lifecycle of these items and even perform secondary “Day 2 Operations” on these items later.

For the example in this post, we’ll be provisioning an AWS Security group in an existing VPC. For now, just remember that AWS Security groups are not managed by vRA, but with some custom work, this is all about to change.

AWS Cloud Formation Templates in vRealize Automation

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 14:15:46 +0000

Amazon has a pretty cool service that allows you to create a template for an entire set of infrastructure. This isn’t a template for a virtual machine, or even a series of virtual machines, but a whole environment. You can create a template with servers, security groups, networks and even PaaS services like their relational database service (RDS). Hey, in today’s world, infrastructure as code is the direction things are going and AWS has a pretty good solution for that already.

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX – Firewall

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:08:27 +0000

So far we’ve talked a lot about using our automation solution to automate network deployments with NSX. But one of the best features about NSX is how we can firewall everything! Lucky for us, we can automate the deployment of specific firewall rules for each of our blueprints as well as deploying brand new networks for them.

Use Case: There are plenty of reasons to firewall your applications. It could be for compliance purposes or just a good practice to limit what traffic can access your apps.

Create a Day 2 Operations Wrapper

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 15:08:30 +0000

Just deploying virtual machines in an automated fashion is probably the most important piece of a cloud management platform, but you still need to be able to manage the machines after they’ve been deployed. In order to add more functionality to the portal, we can create post deployment “actions” that act on our virtual machine. For instance an action that snapshots a virtual machine would be a good one. We refer to these actions that take place after the provisioning process a “Day 2 Operation”, probably because it’s likely to happen on the second day or later. Clever huh?

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX – Load Balancing

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 15:19:10 +0000

If you’re building a multi-machine blueprint or multi-tiered app, there is a high likelihood that at least some of those machines will want to be load balanced. Many apps require multiple web servers in order to provide additional availability or to scale out. vRealize Automation 6 coupled with NSX will allow you to put some load balancing right into your server blueprints.

Just to set the stage here, we’re going to deploy an NSX Edge appliance with our multi-machine blueprint and this will load balance both HTTPs and HTTP traffic between a pair of servers.

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - NAT

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 15:10:54 +0000

You’re network isn’t fully on IPv6 yet? Ah, well don’t worry you’re certainly not alone, in fact you’re for sure in the majority. Knowing this, you’re probably using some sort of network address translation (NAT). Luckily, vRealize Automation can help you deploy translated networks as well as routed and private networks with a little help from NSX.

A quick refresher here, a translated network is a network that remaps an IP Address space from one to another. The quickest way to explain this is a public and a private IP Address. Your computer likely sits behind a firewall and has a private address like 192.168.1.50 but when you send traffic to the internet, the firewall translates it into a public IP Address like 143.95.32.129. This translation can be used to do things like keeping two servers on a network with the exact same IP Address.

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Initial Setup of NSX

Mon, 12 Oct 2015 14:00:22 +0000

Before we can start deploying environments with automated network segments, we need to do some basic setup of the NSX environment.

NSX Manager Setup

It should be obvious that you need to setup NSX Manager, deploy controllers and do some host preparation. These are basic setup procedures just to use NSX even without vRealize Automation in the middle of things, but just as a quick review:

Install NSX Manager and deploy NSX Controller Nodes

NSX Manager setup can be deployed from an OVA and then you must register the NSX Manager with vCenter. After this is complete, deploy three NSX Controller nodes to configure your logical constructs.

vRealize Automation Load Balancer Settings

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 13:56:30 +0000

I found some conflicting information about setting up load balancers for vRealize Automation in a Distributed installation, specifically around Health Checks. The following health checks were found to work for a fully distributed installation of vRA 6.2.2.

vRealize Automation Appliances

This is the pair of vRealize Automation Linux appliances that are deployed via OVA file.

Type: HTTPS

Interval: 5 seconds

Timeout: 9 seconds

Send String: GET /vcac/services/api/statusrn

Load Balancing Method: Round Robin

vRealize Automation and vCloud Air Integration

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 14:07:42 +0000

vRealize Automation is at its best when it can leverage multiple infrastructures to provide a hybrid cloud infrastructure. One of the things we might want to do is to set up VMware vCloud Air integration with your vRA instance.

To start, we need to have a vCloud Air account which you can currently sign up for with some initial credits to get you started for free. Once you’ve got an account you’ll be able to setup a VDC and will have some catalogs that you can build VMs from. If you’re concerned about these steps, don’t worry a default VDC including some storage and a network will be there for you by default.

vRealize Automation Infoblox Integration

Tue, 04 Aug 2015 01:47:59 +0000

Infoblox is a pretty popular IP Address Management (IPAM) solution for many shops. Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate your automation solution such as vRealize Automation, with your existing IPAM system? Well, don’t worry. You can!

Infoblox Setup

This post isn’t going to go into great detail about the setup of the Infoblox appliance but we do need to make sure that we’re licensed for API usage correctly. Ensure that the infoblox appliance has the “Cloud Network Automation” license applied to it. This is an easy thing to check. If your appliance has the “Cloud” tab, then the license is enabled.

vRealize Automation 6 - Post Provisioning Workflows on AWS

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 13:33:40 +0000

In order to deploy a fully provisioned automated deployment of a server we have to look past just deploying a virtual machine OS and configuring an IP Address. In order to get something usable we also need to configure the server with some applications or make post provisioning changes. For instance we might want to install Apache after deploying a Linux machine. In vRealize Automation deployments invoke a post-provisioning stub to call vRealize Orchestrator workflows to make additional changes. This works very well on a vSphere environment since we can leverage VMtools to access the guest OS. But if you’ve ever deployed an instance in Amazon EC2 you’ll know that this isn’t quite as easy. EC2 instances don’t have VMTools to allow us into the guest OS. To make matters worse, the current version of vRealize Automation doesn’t pass the IP address of the guest Operating System to vRO. See this KB article from VMware for more information.

vPostgres for vRealize Automation Gotcha

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 13:45:15 +0000

If you’re planning on doing a full distributed installation of vRealize Automation, you’ll likely want to have some protection for the vPostgres database. Having a single point of failure defeats the purpose of doing a full distributed install. I’ve been doing a bunch of work on this lately and wanted to warn people of a gotcha if you’re using a load balancer.

Non-Distributed Install

To give us a better understanding, take a look at a pair of vRealize Automation Appliances that aren’t in a high availability solution. In the picture below, there are two vRealize Automation Appliances and each of them is communicating with their own embedded vPostgres Database. This is the default configuration when deployed from VMware and works just fine.

vCAC usp_SelectAgent SQL Errors

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 13:31:51 +0000

The home lab got a vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) refresh to version 6.1 recently and although I’d posted a guide to installing vCAC 6 earlier, I found myself having a few errors with my vCAC 6.1 deployment. The only difference in my environment was the version of Windows I used for the IaaS components. Instead of using server 2008R2 as I did with 6.0, I used Server 2012 R2 for vCAC 6.1 since it was now supported.

Trouble Configuring the vCAC appliance

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 13:05:39 +0000

I thought it was necessary to get this post out. I’ve heard numerous people say that they’ve tried to install VMware’s vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) but for one reason or another it just didn’t seem to work. I myself recently installed this and had issues, but somehow got it to install correctly on the third try. If you’ve had trouble configuring the vCAC appliance then look for the tip below.