Posts

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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”. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Home Labs aren’t cheap. Depending on what you want to do with your lab, they can even be really expensive. If you’re looking at building one for yourself, you should take some time to determine what you want to get out of it. I’ve found that having a home lab is an incredibly valuable asset to my continuing education and I attribute much of my career success to having one. To me, it’s as essential tool for my career, but for others its a money pit. ...

“So, what do you really do for a living?” This is a pretty common question that I get asked these days. I’ve got a Bachelors degree in Management Information Systems. I also have a VCDX which is some sort of highly desired certification so I must be pretty skilled at whatever it is I do. So what exactly is it? The truth of the matter is that I have a job in the computer industry and thats about all I can accurately describe to someone who isn’t also in this field. It’s tough to explain virtual servers, Git or VLANs to someone over the course of an elevator ride. You need a certain level of background to understand those concepts. ...