Vcac

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. ...

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) ...

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. ...