Vra7 on The IT Hollow

Upgrade to vRA 7.5

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 14:03:53 +0000

Upgrading your vRealize Automation instance has some times been a painful exercise. But this was in the early days after VMware purchased the product from DynamicOps. It’s taken a while, but the upgrade process has improved for each and every version, in my opinion, and 7.5 is no exception. If you’re on a previous version, here is a quick rundown on the upgrade process from 7.4 to 7.5.

Note: As always, please read the the official upgrade documentation. It includes prerequisites and steps that should always be followed. https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Automation/7.5/vrealize-automation-7172732to75upgrading.pdf

vRA 7.3 Component Profiles

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 14:05:22 +0000

Preventing blueprint sprawl should be a consideration if you’re building out a new cloud through vRealize Automation. Too many blueprints and your users will be confused by the offerings and the more blueprints, the more maintenance needed to manage them. We’ve had custom methods for managing sprawl up until vRA 7.3 was released. Now we have some slick new methods right out of the box to cut down on the number of blueprints in use. These new out of the box configurations are called Component Profiles.

vRA 7.3 Endpoints Missing

Tue, 30 May 2017 14:08:58 +0000

vRealize Automation version 7.3 dropped a few weeks ago and you’re really excited about the new improvements that have been made with the platform. Release Notes for version 7.3 You’ve gone through the upgrade process which is constantly improving I might add but once you log in you find out that your endpoints that you spent so much time building are now missing. Kind of like the ones in my screenshot below.

vRA Placement Decisions with a Dynamic Form

Mon, 22 May 2017 14:07:31 +0000

vRA is great at deploying servers in an automated fashion, but to really use the built in functionality for an organization some additional information should be requested to properly place the workloads in the environment. This post covers how to ask users for the correct information to properly determine the placement location of new server workloads.

Cluster Placement

The first placement decision that needs to be made is which cluster the workload should be placed on. This can be done with reservations and reservation policies but often comes with some blueprint sprawl. We’d like to be able to ask the requester which environment the workload should be placed on. To specify a cluster (which could include a cluster on a different vCenter or datacenter) we’ll modify an xml document stored in the IaaS Server(s) which will describe our datacenters. In my example I’ve got two clusters in a single vCenter named “Management” and “Workload”. My clusters are shown below.

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

Using vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 14:05:30 +0000

In previous posts we covered how to install, configure and setup vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps (code named Houdini) so that we could get to this point. During this post we’ll take one of our vRA blueprints in the development instance and move it to the production instance. Let’s get started.

To set the stage, here is my development instance where I have several blueprints at my disposal. Some of them even work! (That was a joke) For this exercise, I want to move the “Server2016” catalog from my development instance to my production instance because I have it working perfectly with my vSphere environment.

Configuring vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps Endpoints

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 14:03:50 +0000

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.

Installing Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 14:02:58 +0000

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.

Adding an Azure Endpoint to vRealize Automation 7

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 14:03:55 +0000

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.

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.

Scaling in vRealize Automation

Thu, 06 Oct 2016 14:18:06 +0000

One of the new features of vRealize Automation in version 7.1 is the ability to scale out or scale in your servers. This sort of scaling is a horizontal scaling of the number of servers. For instance, if you had deployed a single web server, you can scale out to two, three etc. When you scale in, you can go from four servers to three and so on.

Use Cases

The use cases here could really vary widely. The easiest to get started with would be some sort of a web / database deployment where the web servers have some static front end web pages and can be deployed over and over again with the same configurations. If we were to place the web servers behind a load balancer (yep, think NSX here for you vSphere junkies) then your web applications can be scaled horizontally based on when you run out of resources.

Execute vRO Workflow from AWS Lambda

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 14:00:15 +0000

The use cases here are open for debate, but you can setup a serverless call to vRealize Orchestrator to execute your custom orchestration tasks. Maybe you’re integrating this with an Amazon IoT button, or you want voice deployments with Amazon Echo, or maybe you’re just trying to provide access to your workflows based on a CloudWatch event in Amazon. In any case, it is possible to setup an Amazon Lambda call to execute a vRO workflow. In this post, we’ll actually build a Lambda function that executes a vRO workflow that deploys a CentOS virtual machine in vRealize Automation, but the workflow could really be anything you want.

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.

vRealize Code Stream with Artifactory

Mon, 23 May 2016 14:04:37 +0000

vRealize Code Stream now comes pre-packaged with JFrog Artifactory which allows us to do some cool things while we’re testing and deploying new code. To begin this post, lets take a look at what an artifactory is and how we can use it.

An artifactory is a version control repository, typically used for binary objects like .jar files. You might already be thinking, how is this different from GIT? My Github account already has repos and does its own version control. True, but what if we don’t want to pull down an entire repo to do work? Maybe we only need a single file of a build or we want to be able to pull down different versions of the same file without creating branches, forks, additional repos or committing new code? This is where an artifactory service can really shine.

vRealize Automation 7 - Deploy NSX Blueprints

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 15:10:20 +0000

In the previous post we went over how to get the basics configured for NSX and vRealize Automation integration. In this post we’ll build a blueprint and deploy it! Let’s jump right in and get started.

Blueprint Designer

Login to your vRA tenant and click on the Design Tab. Create a new blueprint just like we have done in the past posts. This time when you are creating your blueprint, click the NSX Settings tab and select the Transport zone. I’ve also added a reservation policy that can help define with reservations are available for this blueprint.

vRealize Automation 7 - NSX Initial Setup

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 15:01:03 +0000

Its time to think about deploying our networks through vRA. Deploying servers are cool, but deploying three tiered applications in different networks is cooler. So lets add VMware NSX to our cloud portal and get cracking.

The first step is to have NSX up and running in your vSphere environment. Once this simple task is complete, a Distributed Logical Router should be deployed with an Uplink interface configured. The diagram below explains what needs to be setup in vSphere prior to doing any configurations in vRealize Automation. A Distributed Logical Router with a single uplink to an Edge Services Gateway should be configured first, then any new networks will be built through the vRealize Automation integration. While the section of the diagram that is manual, will remain roughly the same throughout, the section handled by vRealize Automation will change often, based on the workloads that are deployed. Note: be sure to setup some routing between your Provider Edge and the DLR so that you can reach the new networks that vRA creates.

vRealize Automation 7 – XaaS Blueprints

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 15:03:07 +0000

XaaS isn’t a made up term, well maybe it is, but it supposed to stand for “Anything as a Service.” vRealize Automation will allow you to publish vRO workflows in the service catalog. This means that you can publish just about any thing you can think of, and not just server blueprints. If you have a workflow that can order your coffee and have it delivered to you, then you can publish it in your vRA service catalog. Side note, if you have that workflow, please share it with the rest of us.

vRealize Automation 7 - Load Balancer Rules

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:15:32 +0000

In a previous post we went over installing an Enterprise Install of vRealize Automation behind a load balancer. This install required us to setup a Load Balancer with three VIPs but also required that we only had one active member in each VIP. A load balancer with a single member doesn’t really balance much load does it?

After the installation is done, some modifications need to be made on the Load Balancer. The instructions on this can be found in the official vRealize Automation Load Balancing Configuration Guide if you want to learn more. There are several examples on how to setup load balancing on an F5 load balancer and NSX for example. This post will focus on a KEMP load balancer which is free for vExperts and it will all be shown through with GUI examples.

vRealize Automation 7 – Enterprise Install

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 15:09:48 +0000

OK, You’ve done a vRealize Automation 7 simple install and have the basics down. Now it’s time to put your grown up pants on, and get an enterprise install done. This is a pretty long process, so be ready, but trust me, this is much better in version 7 than in the past.

Load Balancer

To start with, you will want to configure your load balancer. An enterprise install means that you’ll want at least two of each type of service so that you can protect yourself from a failure. There are three Virtual IPs (VIPs) that should be created prior to starting your install. The table below lists an example list of VIPs with their associated members and ports.

vRealize Automation 7 – Custom Actions

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 15:31:16 +0000

We’ve deployed a virtual machine from a vRA blueprint, but we still have to manage that machine. One of the cool things we can do with vRealize Automation 7 is to add a custom action. This takes the virtual machine object and runs a vRealize Orchestration blueprint against that input. We call these actions “Day 2 Operations” since they happen post provisioning.

To create a new custom resource action go to the Design Tab –> Design –> Resource Actions. Click the “New” button to add a new action.

vRealize Automation 7 - Custom Properties

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 15:09:39 +0000

Custom Properties are used to control aspects of machines that users are able to provision. For example, memory and CPU are required information that are necessary for users to deploy a VM from a blueprint. Custom properties can be assigned to a blueprint or reservation to control how memory and CPU should be configured.

Custom properties are really powerful attributes that can vastly change how a machine behaves. I like to think of custom properties as the “Windows Registry” of vRealize Automation. Changing one property can have a huge effect on deployments.

vRealize Automation 7 – Subscriptions

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 15:05:14 +0000

In vRealize Automation 7 a new concept was introduced called a “Subscription.” A subscription is a way to allow you to execute a vRealize Orchestrator workflow based on some sort of event that has taken place in vRA. Simple idea huh? Well some of you might be thinking to yourself, “Yeah, this is called a stub, Duh!” The truth is that stubs are still available in vRealize Automation 7 but are clearly being phased out and we should stop using them soon because they are likely to not be around in future versions. The idea of an event subscription is a lot like a stub when in the context of machine provisioning, but there are a lot more events that can be triggered than the stubs that have been around in previous versions. Let’s take a look.

vRealize Automation 7 – Manage Catalog Items

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 15:05:37 +0000

You’ve created your blueprints and entitled users to use them. How do we get them to show up in our service catalog? How do we make them look pretty and organized? For that, we need to look at managing catalog items.

Log in as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Catalog Management –> Catalog Items. From here, we’ll need to look for the blueprint that we’ve previously published. Click on the blueprint.

vRealize Automation 7 – Entitlements

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 15:01:13 +0000

An entitlement is how we assign users a set of catalog items. Each of these entitlements can be managed by the business group manager or a tenant administrator can manage entitlements for all business groups in their tenant.

To create a new entitlement go to Administration tab –> Catalog Management –> Entitlements. Click the “New” button to add a new entitlement.

Under the General tab, enter a name for the entitlement and a description. Change the status to “Active” and select a Business Group. Note: If only a single business group has been created, this will not be selectable since it will default to the only available group. Then select the users who will be part of this entitlement.

vRealize Automation 7 – Blueprints

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:10:13 +0000

Blueprints are arguably the thing you’ll spend most of your operational time dealing with in vRealize Automation. We’ve finally gotten most of the setup done so that we can publish our vSphere templates in vRA.

To create a blueprint in vRealize Automation 7 go to the “Design” tab. Note: If you’re missing this tab, be sure you added yourself to the custom group with permissions like we did in a previous post, and that you’ve logged back into the portal after doing so.

vRealize Automation 7 – Custom Groups

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:05:40 +0000

If you’ve been reading the whole series of posts on vRealize Automation 7, then you’ll know that we’ve already been setting up roles in our cloud portal, but we’re not done yet. If you need any permissions besides just requesting a blueprint, you’ll need to be added to a custom group first.

To create a custom group, login as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Users and Groups –> Custom Groups. From there click the “New” button to add a new custom group.

vRealize Automation 7 – Services

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 15:05:21 +0000

Services might be a poor name for this feature of vRealize Automation 7. When I think of a service, I think of some sort of activity that is being provided but in the case of vRA a service is little more than a category or type. For example, I could have a service called “Private Cloud” and put all of my vSphere blueprints in it and another one called “Public Cloud” and put all of my AWS blueprints in it. In the screenshot below you can see the services in a catalog. If you highlight the “All Services” service, it will show you all blueprints regardless of their service category. Otherwise, selecting a specific service will show you only the blueprints in that category.

vRealize Automation 7 – Reservations

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 15:16:53 +0000

vRealize Automation 7 uses the concept of reservations to grant a percentage of fabric group resources to a business group. To add a reservation go to Infrastructure –> Reservations. Click the “New” button to add a reservation and then select the type of reservation to be added. Since I’m using a vSphere Cluster, I selected Virtual –> vCenter. Depending on what kind of reservations you’ve selected, the next few screens may be different, but I’m assuming many people will use vSphere so I’ve chosen this for my example.

vRealize Automation 7 – Business Groups

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 15:15:27 +0000

The job of a business group is to associate a set of resources with a set of users. Think of it this way, your development team and your production managers likely need to deploy machines to different sets of servers. I should mention that a business group doesn’t do this by itself. Instead it is combined with a reservation which we’ll discuss in the next post. But before we can build those out, lets setup our business groups as well as machine prefixes.

vRealize Automation 7 – Fabric Groups

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 15:09:39 +0000

In the last post we setup an vCenter endpoint that defines how our vRealize Automation solution will talk to our vSphere environment. Now we must create a fabric group. Fabric Groups are a way of segmenting our endpoints into different types of resources or to separate them by intent. These groups are mandatory before you can build anything so don’t think that since you don’t need to segment your resources, that you can get away with not creating one.

vRealize Automation 7 – Endpoints

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 15:06:46 +0000

Now 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.

vRealize Automation 7 – Create Tenants

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 16:10:08 +0000

Now it’s time to create a new tenant in our vRealize Automation portal. Let’s login to the portal as the system administrator account as we have before. Click the Tenants tab and then click the “New” button.

Give the new tenant a name and a description. Then enter a URL name. This name will be appended to this string: https://[vraappliance.domain.name]/vcac/org/ and will be the URL that users will login to. In my example the url is https://vra7.hollow.local/vcac/org/labtenant. Click “Submit and Next”.

vRealize Automation 7 - Authentication

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 15:03:15 +0000

In order to setup Active Directory Integrated Authentication, we must login to our default tenant again but this time as our “Tenant Administrator” (we setup in the previous post) instead of the system administrator account that is created during initial setup.

Once you’re logged in, click the Administration tab –> Directories Management –> Directories and then click the “Add Directory” button. Give the directory a descriptive name like the name of the ad domain for example. Then select the type of directory. I’ve chosen the “Active Directory (Integrated Windows Authentication)” option. This will add the vRA appliance to the AD Domain and use the computer account for authentication. Note: you must setup Active Directory in the default (vsphere.local) tenant before it can be used in the subtenants.

vRealize Automation 7 - Base Setup

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:07:46 +0000

We’ve got vRA installed and thats a good start. Our next step is to login to the portal and start doing some configuration. Go to https://vra-appliance-name-orIP and enter the administrator login that you specified during your install. Unlike prior versions of vRealize Automation, no domain vsphere.local domain suffix is required to login.

To start, Lets add some local users to our vSphere.local tenant. Click on the vsphere.local tenant.

Click on the “Local users” tab and then click the “New” button to add a local account. I’ve created a vraadmin account that will be a local account only used to manage the default tenant configurations.

vRealize Automation 7 Guide

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:45:35 +0000

If following the posts in order, this guide should help you setup vRealize Automation 7 from start to finish. This is a getting started guide that will hopefully get you on the right path, answer any questions you might have, and give you tips on deploying your own cloud management portal.

Part 1 - Simple Installation

Part 2 -Base Setup

Part 3 - Authentication

Part 4 - Tenants

Part 5 - Endpoints

Part 6 - Fabric Groups

Part 7 - Business Groups

Part 8 - Reservations

Part 9 - Services

Part 10 - Custom Groups

Part 11 - Blueprints

Part 12 - Entitlements

Part 13 - Manage Catalog Items

Part 14 - Event Subscriptions

Part 15 - Custom Properties

Part 16 - XaaS Blueprints

Part 17 - Resource Actions

Part 18 - Enterprise Install

Part 19 - Load Balancer Settings

Part 20 - NSX Initial Setup

Part 21 - NSX Blueprints

Part 22 - Code Stream and Jenkins Setup

Part 23 - Code Stream and Artifactory Setup

Part 24 - Add Custom Items to vRA7

Part 25 - Upgrade vRA from 7.1 to 7.2

Part 26 - Adding an Azure Endpoint

Part 27 - Installing vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 28 - Configuring Endpoints for vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 29 - Using vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 30 - Unit Testing with vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 31 - Containers on vRealize Automation

Part 32 - vRA 7.3 Component Profiles

Part 33 - vRA 7.5 Upgrade

If you’re looking for a getting started video, check out this P luralsight course for a quick leg up on vRA 7.

vRealize Automation 7 Simple Installation

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:00:21 +0000

This is our first stop in our journey to install vRealize Automation 7 and all of it’s new features. This post starts with the setup of the environment and assumes that you’ve deployed a vRealize Automation appliance from an OVA and that you’ve also got a Windows Server deployed so that we can install the IAAS components on it.

After you’ve deployed the vRA7 OVA, login to the appliance with the root login and password supplied during your OVA deployment.