Posts

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. ...

It’s a pretty common design request these days to have a single authentication source. I mean, do you really want to have to manage a bunch of different logins instead of having to remember one? Also, five different accounts give attackers five different avenues to try to exploit. So many times we use our existing Active Directory infrastructure as our single source of authentication. Amazon Web Services (AWS) needs a way for people to login and will allow you to use your own Active Directory credentials through Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). This post will walk you through the setup of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) on Windows Server 2016 and configuring it to be your credentials for AWS. ...

Version 7.2 of vRealize Automation introduced containers to the vRA solution. This post is designed to get you up and running with some basic containers and give you the tools needed to deploy some of your own containers in your environment. The steps involved in this post assume that you have the “Container Administrator” and “Container Architect” roles. These are administrative roles that you’d need to get things started in your vRA instance. ...

To me, a home lab is an important piece of my ongoing education. It’s one thing to watch videos and take classes but getting some time to build, configure or run solutions in your own setting is an invaluable resource. In my life, I’ve never learned anything REALLY well until I’ve had to operate and troubleshoot it. Having a mission critical system crash and having to learn how to fix it is a great way to learn things very quickly but also pretty painful. So to me, a home lab is critical. ...

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. ...