Automation

If you’re brand new to Ansible but have some vRealize Automation and Orchestration experience, this post will get you started with a configuration management tool. The goal in this example is to deploy a CentOS server from vRealize Automation and then have Ansible configure Apache and deploy a web page. It assumes that you have no Ansible server setup, but do have a working vRealize Automation instance. If you need help with setting up vRealize Automation 7 take a look at the guide here. ...

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. ...

If you’re planning on doing a full distributed installation of vRealize Automation, you’ll likely want to have some protection for the vPostgres database. Having a single point of failure defeats the purpose of doing a full distributed install. I’ve been doing a bunch of work on this lately and wanted to warn people of a gotcha if you’re using a load balancer. Non-Distributed Install To give us a better understanding, take a look at a pair of vRealize Automation Appliances that aren’t in a high availability solution. In the picture below, there are two vRealize Automation Appliances and each of them is communicating with their own embedded vPostgres Database. This is the default configuration when deployed from VMware and works just fine. ...

vRealize Automation is a great way to allow teams to deploy virtual machines and manage them throughout their entire lifecycle. You can control exactly where you want the machines deployed and the processes that must happen in order to meet company guidelines. Sometimes, you’d like to give some additional options to the end user when they deploy a machine. To do this, we can use a custom property. Build a Property in the Property Dictionary To start, lets build a new property in the property dictionary. To do this, go to the Infrastructure Tab –> Blueprints –> Property Dictionary. From there, we can add a “New Property Definition”. In the example below I’ve created a very generic “HollowTestProperty” and left the display name the same. A description is always a good idea and the Control Type I changed to “DropDownList”. This will mean that we can enter a series of values to be selected by the end user at the time of the request. Be sure to click the green check mark to save the entry. ...

It may seem like a trivial thing, but setting up some customizations for your vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) deployment can really make your IaaS solution stand out, and a good looking portal might help with buy-in from your users. Branding Setting up your portal with a logo and a color scheme that mimic’s your organization is a typical thing to do after getting a portal up and running. Login to your vCAC instance with a Tenant Administrator login, go to the Administration Tab –> Branding. Here, you can upload your logo, add a product name (or department name), background colors, text colors and whatever you’d like. ...

Your powerful new cloud automation software is up and running, but we need to have some sort of check and balance to be sure that people aren’t creating VMs on a whim because it’s so easy to do. For this, we can use an approval process. Maybe a supervisor, or even the CIO can approval the additional resources. Approval Policies To setup an approval policy, login as a Tenant Administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Approval Policies. Click the familiar green “+” icon to add a new policy. ...

In the last post, we showed how to use vCAC to surface a vCO workflow. The problem presents itself when the vCO workflow is looking for something other than a string for a variable. What if you are looking for an object? For example there may be a user named “Clarice Starling” and that name could be a string. But the Active Directory object for user Clarice Starling has many attributes such as account, description, permissions etc and that is not a string. So if you want to perform an action on an object from vCAC, what do you do? ...

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. ...