vRealize Automation Load Balancer Settings

I found some conflicting information about setting up load balancers for vRealize Automation in a Distributed installation, specifically around Health Checks. The following health checks were found to work for a fully distributed installation of vRA 6.2.2. vRealize Automation Appliances This is the pair of vRealize Automation Linux appliances that are deployed via OVA file. Type: HTTPS Interval: 5 seconds Timeout: 9 seconds Send String: GET /vcac/services/api/statusrn Load Balancing Method: Round Robin ...

September 28, 2015 · 2 min · eshanks

vRealize Automation and vCloud Air Integration

vRealize Automation is at its best when it can leverage multiple infrastructures to provide a hybrid cloud infrastructure. One of the things we might want to do is to set up VMware vCloud Air integration with your vRA instance. To start, we need to have a vCloud Air account which you can currently sign up for with some initial credits to get you started for free. Once you’ve got an account you’ll be able to setup a VDC and will have some catalogs that you can build VMs from. If you’re concerned about these steps, don’t worry a default VDC including some storage and a network will be there for you by default. ...

September 21, 2015 · 5 min · eshanks

Assign a VM to a Rubrik slaDomain

This last post in the series shows you how Nick Colyer and I to tie everything together. If you want to just download the plugins and get started, please visit Github.com and import the plugins into your own vRealize Orchestrator environment. Download the Plugin from Github NOTE: The first version of this code has been refactored and migrated to Github in Rubrik’s Repository since the time of this initial writing To recap where we’ve been, we: ...

September 14, 2015 · 4 min · eshanks

Get Rubrik VM through vRealize Orchestrator

Part four of this series will show you how to lookup a VM in the Rubrik Hybrid Cloud appliance through the REST API by using vRealize Orchestrator. If you’d rather just download the plugin and get using it, check out the link to Github to get the plugin and don’t forget to check out Nick Colyer’s post over at systemsgame.com about how to use it. Download the Plugin from Github NOTE: The first version of this code has been refactored and migrated to Github in Rubrik’s Repository since the time of this initial writing ...

September 10, 2015 · 4 min · eshanks

Rubrik API Logins through vRealize Orchestrator

Part three of this series focuses on how Nick Colyer and I built the authentication piece of the plugin so that we could then pass commands to the Rubrik appliance. An API requires a login just like any other portal would. Since this is a a REST API, we actually need to do a “POST” on the login resource to get ourselves an authentication token. Download the Plugin from Github NOTE: The first version of this code has been refactored and migrated to Github in Rubrik’s Repository since the time of this initial writing ...

September 8, 2015 · 6 min · eshanks

VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 Announced

VMware announced Site Recovery Manager version 6.1 this week at VMworld in San Francisco California. Several new features were unveiled for VMware’s flagship Disaster Recovery product. Storage Profile Protection Groups Remember back in the old days (prior to today), when deploying a new virtual machine we had to ensure the datastore we were putting the virtual machine on was replicated? Not only that, but if this new VM was part of a group of similar VMs that needed to fail over together, we needed to make sure it was in the same protection group? Well VMware decided this was a cumbersome process and added “Storage Profile Protection Groups”. ...

August 31, 2015 · 3 min · eshanks

vRealize Orchestrator REST Hosts and Operations for Rubrik

In part one of this series, we went over some basics about what REST is and the methods involved in it. In this post, we’ll add a REST host and show you how to add some REST Operations. To begin, we need to add a REST host. In plain terms, this is simply a host that will be accepting an API call. In this case, we’re adding the Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance as our REST host. ...

August 27, 2015 · 5 min · eshanks

Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and Rubrik's REST API

What’s this REST thing everyone keeps talking about? “Oh, don’t worry, we have a REST API.” or “It’s just a simple REST call.” At one point I was hearing these phrases and would get very frustrated. If REST is so commonplace or so simple to use, then why did I not know how to do it? If this sounds like you, then keep reading. I work for a company called “Ahead” as a consultant and they recently got a Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance in their lab but my colleague Nick Colyer and I noticed that they didn’t have any vRealize Orchestrator Plugins for it. We decided to build these on our own, with the help of Chris Wahl and publish them for the community to use. ...

August 25, 2015 · 4 min · eshanks

Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and Rubrik's REST API

What’s this REST thing everyone keeps talking about? “Oh, don’t worry, we have a REST API.” or “It’s just a simple REST call.” At one point I was hearing these phrases and would get very frustrated. If REST is so commonplace or so simple to use, then why did I not know how to do it? If this sounds like you, then keep reading. I work for a company called “Ahead” as a consultant and they recently got a Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance in their lab but my colleague Nick Colyer and I noticed that they didn’t have any vRealize Orchestrator Plugins for it. We decided to build these on our own, with the help of Chris Wahl and publish them for the community to use. ...

August 25, 2015 · 4 min · eshanks

Linksys AC3200 Review

I ran into that funny problem where if you have so many wireless devices you’re overloading your tiny wireless router that you’ve had for 5 years. After looking around a bit I settled on the AC3200 Triband Router from Linksys. I wanted something that would be really powerful to handle all of my devices and something with a cool factor. The device arrived and had some simple instructions to configure it. Connect to the default SSID via a wireless device and open up your web browser to myrouter.local to get connected. The setup had a “Quick Setup” mode to get everything running quickly but I found that the quick setup would not work for my environment. The quick setup expects that you’ve connected your Wireless Router directly to a cable modem and in my case I’m connected to a layer three switch behind an ASA firewall. After resetting the router and doing the manual setup though, everything was good. ...

August 17, 2015 · 3 min · eshanks