Vcac on The IT Hollow

Upgrade from vRA from 7.1 to 7.2

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 15:00:25 +0000

vRealize Automation has had a different upgrade process for about every version that I can think of. The upgrade from vRA 7.1 to 7.2 is no exception, but this time you can see that some good things are happening to this process. There are fewer manual steps to do to make sure the upgrade goes smoothly and a script is now used to upgrade the IaaS Components which is a nice change from the older methods. As with any upgrade, you should read all of the instructions in the official documentation before proceeding.

Ansible with vRealize Automation Quickstart

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 14:04:51 +0000

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 7 - Deploy NSX Blueprints

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 15:10:20 +0000

In the previous post we went over how to get the basics configured for NSX and vRealize Automation integration. In this post we’ll build a blueprint and deploy it! Let’s jump right in and get started.

Blueprint Designer

Login to your vRA tenant and click on the Design Tab. Create a new blueprint just like we have done in the past posts. This time when you are creating your blueprint, click the NSX Settings tab and select the Transport zone. I’ve also added a reservation policy that can help define with reservations are available for this blueprint.

vRealize Automation 7 - NSX Initial Setup

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 15:01:03 +0000

Its time to think about deploying our networks through vRA. Deploying servers are cool, but deploying three tiered applications in different networks is cooler. So lets add VMware NSX to our cloud portal and get cracking.

The first step is to have NSX up and running in your vSphere environment. Once this simple task is complete, a Distributed Logical Router should be deployed with an Uplink interface configured. The diagram below explains what needs to be setup in vSphere prior to doing any configurations in vRealize Automation. A Distributed Logical Router with a single uplink to an Edge Services Gateway should be configured first, then any new networks will be built through the vRealize Automation integration. While the section of the diagram that is manual, will remain roughly the same throughout, the section handled by vRealize Automation will change often, based on the workloads that are deployed. Note: be sure to setup some routing between your Provider Edge and the DLR so that you can reach the new networks that vRA creates.

vRealize Automation 7 – XaaS Blueprints

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 15:03:07 +0000

XaaS isn’t a made up term, well maybe it is, but it supposed to stand for “Anything as a Service.” vRealize Automation will allow you to publish vRO workflows in the service catalog. This means that you can publish just about any thing you can think of, and not just server blueprints. If you have a workflow that can order your coffee and have it delivered to you, then you can publish it in your vRA service catalog. Side note, if you have that workflow, please share it with the rest of us.

vRealize Automation 7 - Load Balancer Rules

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:15:32 +0000

In a previous post we went over installing an Enterprise Install of vRealize Automation behind a load balancer. This install required us to setup a Load Balancer with three VIPs but also required that we only had one active member in each VIP. A load balancer with a single member doesn’t really balance much load does it?

After the installation is done, some modifications need to be made on the Load Balancer. The instructions on this can be found in the official vRealize Automation Load Balancing Configuration Guide if you want to learn more. There are several examples on how to setup load balancing on an F5 load balancer and NSX for example. This post will focus on a KEMP load balancer which is free for vExperts and it will all be shown through with GUI examples.

vRealize Automation 7 – Enterprise Install

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 15:09:48 +0000

OK, You’ve done a vRealize Automation 7 simple install and have the basics down. Now it’s time to put your grown up pants on, and get an enterprise install done. This is a pretty long process, so be ready, but trust me, this is much better in version 7 than in the past.

Load Balancer

To start with, you will want to configure your load balancer. An enterprise install means that you’ll want at least two of each type of service so that you can protect yourself from a failure. There are three Virtual IPs (VIPs) that should be created prior to starting your install. The table below lists an example list of VIPs with their associated members and ports.

vRealize Automation 7 – Custom Actions

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 15:31:16 +0000

We’ve deployed a virtual machine from a vRA blueprint, but we still have to manage that machine. One of the cool things we can do with vRealize Automation 7 is to add a custom action. This takes the virtual machine object and runs a vRealize Orchestration blueprint against that input. We call these actions “Day 2 Operations” since they happen post provisioning.

To create a new custom resource action go to the Design Tab –> Design –> Resource Actions. Click the “New” button to add a new action.

vRealize Automation 7 - Custom Properties

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 15:09:39 +0000

Custom Properties are used to control aspects of machines that users are able to provision. For example, memory and CPU are required information that are necessary for users to deploy a VM from a blueprint. Custom properties can be assigned to a blueprint or reservation to control how memory and CPU should be configured.

Custom properties are really powerful attributes that can vastly change how a machine behaves. I like to think of custom properties as the “Windows Registry” of vRealize Automation. Changing one property can have a huge effect on deployments.

vRealize Automation 7 – Subscriptions

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 15:05:14 +0000

In vRealize Automation 7 a new concept was introduced called a “Subscription.” A subscription is a way to allow you to execute a vRealize Orchestrator workflow based on some sort of event that has taken place in vRA. Simple idea huh? Well some of you might be thinking to yourself, “Yeah, this is called a stub, Duh!” The truth is that stubs are still available in vRealize Automation 7 but are clearly being phased out and we should stop using them soon because they are likely to not be around in future versions. The idea of an event subscription is a lot like a stub when in the context of machine provisioning, but there are a lot more events that can be triggered than the stubs that have been around in previous versions. Let’s take a look.

vRealize Automation 7 – Manage Catalog Items

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 15:05:37 +0000

You’ve created your blueprints and entitled users to use them. How do we get them to show up in our service catalog? How do we make them look pretty and organized? For that, we need to look at managing catalog items.

Log in as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Catalog Management –> Catalog Items. From here, we’ll need to look for the blueprint that we’ve previously published. Click on the blueprint.

vRealize Automation 7 – Entitlements

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 15:01:13 +0000

An entitlement is how we assign users a set of catalog items. Each of these entitlements can be managed by the business group manager or a tenant administrator can manage entitlements for all business groups in their tenant.

To create a new entitlement go to Administration tab –> Catalog Management –> Entitlements. Click the “New” button to add a new entitlement.

Under the General tab, enter a name for the entitlement and a description. Change the status to “Active” and select a Business Group. Note: If only a single business group has been created, this will not be selectable since it will default to the only available group. Then select the users who will be part of this entitlement.

vRealize Automation 7 – Blueprints

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:10:13 +0000

Blueprints are arguably the thing you’ll spend most of your operational time dealing with in vRealize Automation. We’ve finally gotten most of the setup done so that we can publish our vSphere templates in vRA.

To create a blueprint in vRealize Automation 7 go to the “Design” tab. Note: If you’re missing this tab, be sure you added yourself to the custom group with permissions like we did in a previous post, and that you’ve logged back into the portal after doing so.

vRealize Automation 7 – Custom Groups

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:05:40 +0000

If you’ve been reading the whole series of posts on vRealize Automation 7, then you’ll know that we’ve already been setting up roles in our cloud portal, but we’re not done yet. If you need any permissions besides just requesting a blueprint, you’ll need to be added to a custom group first.

To create a custom group, login as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Users and Groups –> Custom Groups. From there click the “New” button to add a new custom group.

vRealize Automation 7 – Services

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 15:05:21 +0000

Services might be a poor name for this feature of vRealize Automation 7. When I think of a service, I think of some sort of activity that is being provided but in the case of vRA a service is little more than a category or type. For example, I could have a service called “Private Cloud” and put all of my vSphere blueprints in it and another one called “Public Cloud” and put all of my AWS blueprints in it. In the screenshot below you can see the services in a catalog. If you highlight the “All Services” service, it will show you all blueprints regardless of their service category. Otherwise, selecting a specific service will show you only the blueprints in that category.

vRealize Automation 7 – Reservations

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 15:16:53 +0000

vRealize Automation 7 uses the concept of reservations to grant a percentage of fabric group resources to a business group. To add a reservation go to Infrastructure –> Reservations. Click the “New” button to add a reservation and then select the type of reservation to be added. Since I’m using a vSphere Cluster, I selected Virtual –> vCenter. Depending on what kind of reservations you’ve selected, the next few screens may be different, but I’m assuming many people will use vSphere so I’ve chosen this for my example.

vRealize Automation 7 – Business Groups

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 15:15:27 +0000

The job of a business group is to associate a set of resources with a set of users. Think of it this way, your development team and your production managers likely need to deploy machines to different sets of servers. I should mention that a business group doesn’t do this by itself. Instead it is combined with a reservation which we’ll discuss in the next post. But before we can build those out, lets setup our business groups as well as machine prefixes.

vRealize Automation 7 – Fabric Groups

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 15:09:39 +0000

In the last post we setup an vCenter endpoint that defines how our vRealize Automation solution will talk to our vSphere environment. Now we must create a fabric group. Fabric Groups are a way of segmenting our endpoints into different types of resources or to separate them by intent. These groups are mandatory before you can build anything so don’t think that since you don’t need to segment your resources, that you can get away with not creating one.

vRealize Automation 7 – Endpoints

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 15:06:46 +0000

Now that we’ve setup our new tenant, lets login as an infrastructure admin and start assigning some resources that we can use. To do this we need to start by adding an endpoint. An endpoint is anything that vRA uses to complete it’s provisioning processes. This could be a public cloud resource such as Amazon Web Services, an external orchestrator appliance, or a private cloud hosted by Hyper-V or vSphere.

vRealize Automation 7 – Create Tenants

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 16:10:08 +0000

Now it’s time to create a new tenant in our vRealize Automation portal. Let’s login to the portal as the system administrator account as we have before. Click the Tenants tab and then click the “New” button.

Give the new tenant a name and a description. Then enter a URL name. This name will be appended to this string: https://[vraappliance.domain.name]/vcac/org/ and will be the URL that users will login to. In my example the url is https://vra7.hollow.local/vcac/org/labtenant. Click “Submit and Next”.

vRealize Automation 7 - Authentication

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 15:03:15 +0000

In order to setup Active Directory Integrated Authentication, we must login to our default tenant again but this time as our “Tenant Administrator” (we setup in the previous post) instead of the system administrator account that is created during initial setup.

Once you’re logged in, click the Administration tab –> Directories Management –> Directories and then click the “Add Directory” button. Give the directory a descriptive name like the name of the ad domain for example. Then select the type of directory. I’ve chosen the “Active Directory (Integrated Windows Authentication)” option. This will add the vRA appliance to the AD Domain and use the computer account for authentication. Note: you must setup Active Directory in the default (vsphere.local) tenant before it can be used in the subtenants.

vRealize Automation 7 - Base Setup

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:07:46 +0000

We’ve got vRA installed and thats a good start. Our next step is to login to the portal and start doing some configuration. Go to https://vra-appliance-name-orIP and enter the administrator login that you specified during your install. Unlike prior versions of vRealize Automation, no domain vsphere.local domain suffix is required to login.

To start, Lets add some local users to our vSphere.local tenant. Click on the vsphere.local tenant.

Click on the “Local users” tab and then click the “New” button to add a local account. I’ve created a vraadmin account that will be a local account only used to manage the default tenant configurations.

vRealize Automation 7 Guide

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:45:35 +0000

If following the posts in order, this guide should help you setup vRealize Automation 7 from start to finish. This is a getting started guide that will hopefully get you on the right path, answer any questions you might have, and give you tips on deploying your own cloud management portal.

Part 1 - Simple Installation

Part 2 -Base Setup

Part 3 - Authentication

Part 4 - Tenants

Part 5 - Endpoints

Part 6 - Fabric Groups

Part 7 - Business Groups

Part 8 - Reservations

Part 9 - Services

Part 10 - Custom Groups

Part 11 - Blueprints

Part 12 - Entitlements

Part 13 - Manage Catalog Items

Part 14 - Event Subscriptions

Part 15 - Custom Properties

Part 16 - XaaS Blueprints

Part 17 - Resource Actions

Part 18 - Enterprise Install

Part 19 - Load Balancer Settings

Part 20 - NSX Initial Setup

Part 21 - NSX Blueprints

Part 22 - Code Stream and Jenkins Setup

Part 23 - Code Stream and Artifactory Setup

Part 24 - Add Custom Items to vRA7

Part 25 - Upgrade vRA from 7.1 to 7.2

Part 26 - Adding an Azure Endpoint

Part 27 - Installing vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 28 - Configuring Endpoints for vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 29 - Using vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 30 - Unit Testing with vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 31 - Containers on vRealize Automation

Part 32 - vRA 7.3 Component Profiles

Part 33 - vRA 7.5 Upgrade

If you’re looking for a getting started video, check out this P luralsight course for a quick leg up on vRA 7.

vRealize Automation 7 Simple Installation

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:00:21 +0000

This is our first stop in our journey to install vRealize Automation 7 and all of it’s new features. This post starts with the setup of the environment and assumes that you’ve deployed a vRealize Automation appliance from an OVA and that you’ve also got a Windows Server deployed so that we can install the IAAS components on it.

After you’ve deployed the vRA7 OVA, login to the appliance with the root login and password supplied during your OVA deployment.

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX – Firewall

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:08:27 +0000

So far we’ve talked a lot about using our automation solution to automate network deployments with NSX. But one of the best features about NSX is how we can firewall everything! Lucky for us, we can automate the deployment of specific firewall rules for each of our blueprints as well as deploying brand new networks for them.

Use Case: There are plenty of reasons to firewall your applications. It could be for compliance purposes or just a good practice to limit what traffic can access your apps.

Custom Options for vRealize Automation Server Requests

Mon, 30 Mar 2015 13:42:16 +0000

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.

vRealize Automation 6.2 Upgrade

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 14:56:53 +0000

Upgrades for the vRealize Automation software (formerly vCloud Automation Center) seem to be coming quite often these days. This post gives a quick overview on how to upgrade your current environment to the latest release. Of course for official documentation, please check out VMware’s documentation for details. vRealize Upgrade Instructions

Pre-Install Steps

Obviously you should ensure that you’ve got backups in the event something catastrophic should occur. Be sure to grab a backup of the IaaS database, and snapshot your vRA appliances, as well as any of the servers running the IaaS components such as the Model Manager, DEM Workers, Orchestrators and Agents. For this guide, we have a vRA appliance, and a single IaaS Server running the rest of the components. A separate SQL Server is housing the database.

VMware Appliance Console Certificates

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 13:01:33 +0000

During a recent install, I got stuck on an issue (or so I thought) assigning an SSL Certificate to some of the vRealize Automation Appliances. I went through all of the installation procedures and the appliance stated “SSL Certificate Installed Successfully”, but when I went to the appliance, the certificate still showed the default VMware certificate.

You can see when I go to the appliance, I was getting a warning on the SSL Certificate.

vRealize Automation 6 Customizations

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 11:01:25 +0000

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.

vRealize Automation 6 Approvals

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 11:00:30 +0000

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.

vRealize Automation 6 Custom Resource Properties

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:58:07 +0000

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?

vRealize Automation 6 Service Blueprint

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:58:07 +0000

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.

vRealize Automation 6 Service Designer and vCO

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:57:25 +0000

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.

vRealize Automation 6 Blueprints and Catalogs

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:56:13 +0000

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.

vRealize Automation 6 Policies and Reservations

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:55:24 +0000

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.

vRealize Automation 6 vCenter Endpoint Setup

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:54:02 +0000

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.

vRealize Automation 6 Basic Configurations

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:53:24 +0000

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.

vRealize Automation 6.0 IaaS Installation

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:51:20 +0000

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)

Trouble Configuring the vCAC appliance

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 13:05:39 +0000

I thought it was necessary to get this post out. I’ve heard numerous people say that they’ve tried to install VMware’s vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) but for one reason or another it just didn’t seem to work. I myself recently installed this and had issues, but somehow got it to install correctly on the third try. If you’ve had trouble configuring the vCAC appliance then look for the tip below.