Automation

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) ...