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We’ve got the main section of vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) setup and running and have created some blueprints to create some servers, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. We can utilize vCAC to perform tasks as well and in my opinion this is where vCAC really makes a big difference. Service Blueprints Instead of creating server blueprints, now we create service blueprints. They’ll be a similar setup to what you’ve seen in previous posts. Go to the Advanced Services Tab –> Service Blueprints and click the green “+” sign to add a new blueprint. ...

vCAC 6 (now renamed vRealize Automation) allows us to provision more than just virtual machines. We can also publish vCenter Orchestrator packages. To do so, we need to configure the Service Designer. Go to the Administration Tab –> Groups and create a group that will have access to the service designer. I just used the Domain Admins group, mainly because it’s my lab. Click the dropdown to edit the group properties. ...

We’re finally ready to start building some blueprints. Resources are available, reservations have been set, groups have been created and now we can build some blueprints. Blueprints Go to the Infrastructure Tab –> Blueprints –> Blueprints and then click “New Blueprint” –> Virtual –> vSphere (vCenter). Give the blueprint a name and a description. In my case, I’m creating a server 2008 R2 blueprint. Select a Reservation Policy and a machine prefix. Then enter a number of days for Archives. This is the number of days the virtual machines will be available after they expire. Think recycling bin in Windows. Also, if you’re so inclined, you can enter a dollar amount to assign to this template per day, so that later on each department can see how much money these VMs cost the company. ...

In this vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) series, we’ve got access to some of our resources now after connecting our vCenter Endpoint, so now we want to create some policies to control how our new VMs will be deployed. Machine Prefixes We’ll be creating a lot of new virtual machines so we’ll want to put a prefix on all these machines so we can identify them. You can have more than one prefix so that you can have different prefixes by department, company, user or so on. ...

We’ve completed the vCAC (now rename to vRealize Automation) appliance deployment, installed IaaS components, setup tenants and identity stores. Now it’s time to get cracking on connecting to some resources that we can use for our applications. I would like to point out that for this section we’ll be logged in as a user that is both an infrastructure admin as well as a tenant admin. I’ve also chosen to complete this configuration under my newly created “Neighborhood Watch” tenant. When adding resources to your tenants, you can do this at the default tenant level and have the sub-tenants use them, or configure the resources at each tenant level. I would steer away from doing it in both places to make troubleshooting easier at a later date. I mean, what happens when you’re sharing the same vCenter at the default level as well as the sub-tenant level? That could get a bit tricky. ...

If you’ve followed the series this far, you’ve got your vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) appliance deployed and your IaaS components installed. The tricky parts are over with, and now the fun begins… configurations! What are you waiting for? Go login at the http://vcacapplaincename/shell-ui-app/ url. Add a Tenant Under Administration –> Tenants, you will see the default tenant which is vsphere.local. This is the context where you can create additional tenants and should probably be considered to be a “Do Not Touch” tenant. Even if you’re only going to have a single tenant, it would be a good idea to create a new one just in case. It’s pretty easy to create more tenants if you make a mistake, but tough to recreate the default tenant. Click the “+” to create a new tenant. ...

Deploying the vCAC (now renamed to vRealize Automation) appliance is only the first step towards getting your Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) up and running. The next step is to get the IaaS components installed on a Windows machine. There are a number of prerequisites but luckily there is a powershell script that can take care of most of it for you. Find the script here. I must mention first that for vCAC 6 (at the time of this writing) .Net 4.5 is required. This does not mean that .Net 4.5 or higher needs to be installed. .Net 4.5 sp1 does not work with the IaaS components which also means that Server 2012 R2 is not a candidate to install the IaaS components on. Use a Server 2008R2 or Server 2012 with .Net 4.5 installed. (vRealize 6.1 fully supports .Net 4.5.1 according to the VMware rep I spoke with at VMworld) ...

In this day and age, almost all the programs we interact with are web pages. Many of the applications we deploy end up having a web front end and are configured with a default SSL Certificate. It’s much more secure to have your own trusted certificate and in previous posts I’ve gone over how to setup the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in a home lab, as well as deploying Web Certificate Templates for our applications. ...

The Array I know what you’re thinking, show me the product! What does it look like, how big is it. 4U storage shelf 2U Storage Controller (dual controllers) CIFSNFSiSCSI 48TB or 96 TB with additional 2.4TB or 4.8 TB SSD Homemade RAID that allows for 2 disk failures on the same storage pool Recovery Something out of the norm with DataGravity’s array is that they use a completely separate set of disks for snapshots. Disks are automatically assigned to different pools are nothing is required from the Administrator to set this up. This diverges from what the rest of the industry is typically does. There are two schools of thought here though: ...

 I got a chance to get a first hand look at Asigra at the Tech Field Day Extra sessions on the Monday of VMworld 2014. I went into the sessions thinking that his was just another backup company, but found that they have a very robust suite of backups and they’ve been around for a very long time. Asigra handles, Cloud Platform apps such as Office365, Salesforce, Google, storage array integration, vSphere snapshot integration, file level backups and the list went on. ...