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This is a series of posts helping you get familiarized with how VMware’s vRealize Automation 6 can leverage VMware’s NSX product to provide software defined networking. The series will show you how to do some basic setup of NSX as well as how to use Private, Routed and NAT networks all from within vRA. vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - NSX Setup vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Private Networks vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Routed Networks vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - NAT vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Load Balancing vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Firewall

Before we can start deploying environments with automated network segments, we need to do some basic setup of the NSX environment. NSX Manager Setup It should be obvious that you need to setup NSX Manager, deploy controllers and do some host preparation. These are basic setup procedures just to use NSX even without vRealize Automation in the middle of things, but just as a quick review: Install NSX Manager and deploy NSX Controller Nodes NSX Manager setup can be deployed from an OVA and then you must register the NSX Manager with vCenter. After this is complete, deploy three NSX Controller nodes to configure your logical constructs. ...

A common task that comes up during an automation engagement relates to passing values from vRealize Automation blueprints over to vRealize Orchestrator. There is a workflow that I use quite frequently that will list the properties available for further programming and you can download the plugin at github.com if you’d like to use it as well. How it works The workflow takes several inputs that are provided by vRealize Automation during a stub like Building Machine, Machine Provisioned or Machine Disposing. These inputs include the vRA Virtual Machine instance, the vCenter Virtual Machine ID, the vRealize Automation Host, the stubs used and most importantly the vRealize Automation VM properties. ...

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 ...

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. ...

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: ...

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 ...

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 ...

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”. ...

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. ...