Posts

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. ...

Veeam is a popular backup product for virtualized environments but who wants to spend their days adding and removing machines to backup jobs? Now available on github is a Veeam package for vRealize Orchestrator. This is my gift to you, just in time for the Hollow-days. Available Features The following features are available with the plugin for it’s initial release. Add a VM to an existing backup job Remove a VM from a backup job Start a backup job immediately Add a Build Profile to vRealize Automation Add a VM to a backup job from vRA Remove a VM from a backup job from vRA Some additional functionality could easily be added to your environment using the existing worfklows such as start a backup as a Day 2 operation in vRA, or change backup jobs etc. The world is your oyster. ...

So far we’ve talked a lot about using our automation solution to automate network deployments with NSX. But one of the best features about NSX is how we can firewall everything! Lucky for us, we can automate the deployment of specific firewall rules for each of our blueprints as well as deploying brand new networks for them. Use Case: There are plenty of reasons to firewall your applications. It could be for compliance purposes or just a good practice to limit what traffic can access your apps. ...

Just deploying virtual machines in an automated fashion is probably the most important piece of a cloud management platform, but you still need to be able to manage the machines after they’ve been deployed. In order to add more functionality to the portal, we can create post deployment “actions” that act on our virtual machine. For instance an action that snapshots a virtual machine would be a good one. We refer to these actions that take place after the provisioning process a “Day 2 Operation”, probably because it’s likely to happen on the second day or later. Clever huh? ...

If you’re building a multi-machine blueprint or multi-tiered app, there is a high likelihood that at least some of those machines will want to be load balanced. Many apps require multiple web servers in order to provide additional availability or to scale out. vRealize Automation 6 coupled with NSX will allow you to put some load balancing right into your server blueprints. Just to set the stage here, we’re going to deploy an NSX Edge appliance with our multi-machine blueprint and this will load balance both HTTPs and HTTP traffic between a pair of servers. ...

You’re network isn’t fully on IPv6 yet? Ah, well don’t worry you’re certainly not alone, in fact you’re for sure in the majority. Knowing this, you’re probably using some sort of network address translation (NAT). Luckily, vRealize Automation can help you deploy translated networks as well as routed and private networks with a little help from NSX. A quick refresher here, a translated network is a network that remaps an IP Address space from one to another. The quickest way to explain this is a public and a private IP Address. Your computer likely sits behind a firewall and has a private address like 192.168.1.50 but when you send traffic to the internet, the firewall translates it into a public IP Address like 143.95.32.129. This translation can be used to do things like keeping two servers on a network with the exact same IP Address. ...

Any corporate network thats larger than a very small business is likely going to have a routed network already. Segmenting networks improves performance and more importantly used for security purposes. Many compliance regulations such as PCI-DSS state that machines need to be segmented from each other unless there is a specific reason for them to be on the same network. For instance your corporate file server doesn’t need to communicate directly with your CRM database full of credit card numbers. The quickest way to fix this is to put these systems on different networks but this can be difficult to manage in a highly automated environment. Developers might need to spin up new applications which may need to be on different network segments from the rest of the environment. Its not very feasible to assume we can now spin up test and delete hundred of machines each day, but need the network team to manually create new network segments and tear them down each day. That wouldn’t be a nice thing to do to your network team. ...

Of the types of networks available through NSX, private networks are the easiest to get going because they don’t require any NSX edge routers to be in place. Think about it, the NSX edge appliance is used to allow communication with the physical network which we won’t need for a private network. A quick refresher here, a private network is a network that is not connected to the rest of the environment. Machines that are on the private network can communicate with each other, but nothing else in the environment. Its simple, think of some machines connected to a switch and the switch isn’t connected to any routers. The machines connected to the switch can talk to each other, but thats it. ...