Vra

Any corporate network thats larger than a very small business is likely going to have a routed network already. Segmenting networks improves performance and more importantly used for security purposes. Many compliance regulations such as PCI-DSS state that machines need to be segmented from each other unless there is a specific reason for them to be on the same network. For instance your corporate file server doesn’t need to communicate directly with your CRM database full of credit card numbers. The quickest way to fix this is to put these systems on different networks but this can be difficult to manage in a highly automated environment. Developers might need to spin up new applications which may need to be on different network segments from the rest of the environment. Its not very feasible to assume we can now spin up test and delete hundred of machines each day, but need the network team to manually create new network segments and tear them down each day. That wouldn’t be a nice thing to do to your network team. ...

Of the types of networks available through NSX, private networks are the easiest to get going because they don’t require any NSX edge routers to be in place. Think about it, the NSX edge appliance is used to allow communication with the physical network which we won’t need for a private network. A quick refresher here, a private network is a network that is not connected to the rest of the environment. Machines that are on the private network can communicate with each other, but nothing else in the environment. Its simple, think of some machines connected to a switch and the switch isn’t connected to any routers. The machines connected to the switch can talk to each other, but thats it. ...

This is a series of posts helping you get familiarized with how VMware’s vRealize Automation 6 can leverage VMware’s NSX product to provide software defined networking. The series will show you how to do some basic setup of NSX as well as how to use Private, Routed and NAT networks all from within vRA. vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - NSX Setup vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Private Networks vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Routed Networks vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - NAT vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Load Balancing vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Firewall

Before we can start deploying environments with automated network segments, we need to do some basic setup of the NSX environment. NSX Manager Setup It should be obvious that you need to setup NSX Manager, deploy controllers and do some host preparation. These are basic setup procedures just to use NSX even without vRealize Automation in the middle of things, but just as a quick review: Install NSX Manager and deploy NSX Controller Nodes NSX Manager setup can be deployed from an OVA and then you must register the NSX Manager with vCenter. After this is complete, deploy three NSX Controller nodes to configure your logical constructs. ...

I found some conflicting information about setting up load balancers for vRealize Automation in a Distributed installation, specifically around Health Checks. The following health checks were found to work for a fully distributed installation of vRA 6.2.2. vRealize Automation Appliances This is the pair of vRealize Automation Linux appliances that are deployed via OVA file. Type: HTTPS Interval: 5 seconds Timeout: 9 seconds Send String: GET /vcac/services/api/statusrn Load Balancing Method: Round Robin ...

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. ...

What’s this REST thing everyone keeps talking about? “Oh, don’t worry, we have a REST API.” or “It’s just a simple REST call.” At one point I was hearing these phrases and would get very frustrated. If REST is so commonplace or so simple to use, then why did I not know how to do it? If this sounds like you, then keep reading. I work for a company called “Ahead” as a consultant and they recently got a Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance in their lab but my colleague Nick Colyer and I noticed that they didn’t have any vRealize Orchestrator Plugins for it. We decided to build these on our own, with the help of Chris Wahl and publish them for the community to use. ...

What’s this REST thing everyone keeps talking about? “Oh, don’t worry, we have a REST API.” or “It’s just a simple REST call.” At one point I was hearing these phrases and would get very frustrated. If REST is so commonplace or so simple to use, then why did I not know how to do it? If this sounds like you, then keep reading. I work for a company called “Ahead” as a consultant and they recently got a Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance in their lab but my colleague Nick Colyer and I noticed that they didn’t have any vRealize Orchestrator Plugins for it. We decided to build these on our own, with the help of Chris Wahl and publish them for the community to use. ...

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. ...

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. ...