Virtualization

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. ...

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. ...

Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light - Milton Apparently, Milton has been through the VCDX process. It is a challenge that will test your resolve and you will probably learn a lot along the way. You’ll also be glad when its over. I’ve been good at many things in my life, but never felt like I was great at anything. I’ve succeeded at most things I’ve attempted, but the VCDX was a goal I truly didn’t think I was capable of achieving. Chris Colotti mentioned in one of his posts that you need to decide why you’re going for the VCDX in the first place. In my case, I was doing it to prove to myself that I could do it. The process really taught me something about myself that I didn’t know. It was my own personal Vision Quest. (Queue Lunatic Fringe them song here) ...

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. ...

It may be necessary to connect to a Linux Guest thats that been provisioned in Amazon Web Services so that you can perform additional operations on it. One of the ways you might want to configure your instances is through vRealize Orchestrator. One of the hang ups with using vRealize Orchestrator to connect to your Linux EC2 instances is that you’ll need an SSH key to connect. This post shows you how you can do this. ...

OK, I know that most of the known world is all of a sudden working on making everything scriptable so that it can be automated or just run from a command line, but come on we still use the GUI for some quick tasks don’t we? One of the cool things about the vSphere Web Client is its ability to create a custom search based on a set of criteria. Just to recap, I said there was a cool feature of the vSphere Web Client. ...

Have you ever tried logging into vRealize Automation and gotten an Incorrect username/password but you’re positive you typed everything in correctly? You try again and find out that if you put the User Principal Name suffix everything works fine. If you’re using a solution like vRealize Automation and notice the login doesn’t work unless you specify a a User Principle Name (UPN) in the form of [email protected], try the following correction. ...

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. ...

Clustering the vPostgres database is an important part of a fully distributed vRealize Automation install. The simple install only requires a single vRealize Appliance and an IaaS Server, but the fully distributed install requires many additional pieces including load balancers to ensure both high availability as well as handling extra load placed by users. The vPostgres database is included with the vRealize Automation appliances, but for a full distributed install, these must be modified so that there is an active and standby vPostgres database running on them. The primary vPostgres database will replicate to a standby read-only database. ...

vRealize Automation is a great way to allow teams to deploy virtual machines and manage them throughout their entire lifecycle. You can control exactly where you want the machines deployed and the processes that must happen in order to meet company guidelines. Sometimes, you’d like to give some additional options to the end user when they deploy a machine. To do this, we can use a custom property. Build a Property in the Property Dictionary To start, lets build a new property in the property dictionary. To do this, go to the Infrastructure Tab –> Blueprints –> Property Dictionary. From there, we can add a “New Property Definition”. In the example below I’ve created a very generic “HollowTestProperty” and left the display name the same. A description is always a good idea and the Control Type I changed to “DropDownList”. This will mean that we can enter a series of values to be selected by the end user at the time of the request. Be sure to click the green check mark to save the entry. ...