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I had some extra materials left over from a home improvement project I had been working on and decided to put them to use on a custom made rack for my lab. My requirements for the rack design were pretty simple. Hold my equipment Make it somewhat portable Needed to be able to work on the equipment from both the front and the back side Able to discretely hide cabling Here is what I came up with. It’s a set of three shelves attached to four posts. The posts in the back are longer because I thought I might add some additional patch paneling in the back. The rack is built on top of casters so I can roll the lab to a different area of my basement if I need to move it’s location for some reason. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...