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Rubrik has announced their latest revision of their Cloud Data Management solution, version 3.2. The new release has some “Snazzy” new features according to one unnamed source from the Rubrik technical marketing team, but I’m focused mainly on one specific capability in this post. I’ve written about Rubrik several times before and have written some of the vRealize Orchestrator workflows for automating deployments with the Rubrik appliance. The main reason I like the solution is how easy it is to manage and that everything is API first, which is a must for automation these days. ...

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

vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps (code named Houdini by VMware) allows us to treat our vRealize Automation Blueprints, or other objects, as pieces of code that can be promoted between environments. In previous posts we’ve done just this, but a glaring piece was missing in during those articles. Promoting code between environments is great, but we’ve got to test it first or this process is only good for moving code around. A full release pipeline including unit tests can make your environment much more useful for organizations trying to ensure consistency. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Packer is a free tool from Hashicorp that allows you to build new images. Keeping base vSphere templates up to date is not too difficult of a task for many, but as we add things like AWS accounts and regions, it’s pretty easy to have sprawl to deal with. We’d like to make sure that an image in our vSphere datacenter looks the same as an image in our public clouds. ...

Many cloud initiatives require having a portal for users to choose which workloads can be deployed. Think of this as a supermarket full of servers, networks, databases, or all of the above. There are product offerings from VMware, Cisco, RightScale and Redhat, used for these deployment methodologies. If you’re an AWS customer though, you’ve got your own catalog available from the native AWS tools called the “Service Catalog” service. This service enables you to deploy and publish CloudFormation templates for your users so that they don’t have to know how RDS, or EC2 instances work. They can select from the catalog and deploy anything you can build in an Amazon CFT. Think of the possibilities. ...