As a consultant I’ve had the opportunity to design, install and configure dozens of production vRealize Automation deployments, from reasonably small Proof of Concept environments to globally-scaled multi-datacenter fully distributed behemoths. It’s fair to say, that I’ve made mistakes along the way – and learned a lot of lessons as to what makes a deployment a success.
In the end, pretty much everything comes down to getting the pre-requisites right. Nothing that I’ve written here is not already documented in the official documentation, and the installation wizard does a huge amount of the work for you.
For the purposes of this post, I am working with the following components, which have been pre-deployed on a single flat network.
vRA Appliances
|
Server
|
CPU
|
RAM
|
Disk
|
|
vra-app-1
|
4
|
18
|
140
|
|
vra-app-2
|
4
|
18
|
140
|
|
Server
|
CPU
|
RAM
|
Disk
|
|
vra-web-1
|
2
|
8
|
60
|
|
vra-web-2
|
2
|
8
|
60
|
|
vra-man-1
|
2
|
8
|
60
|
|
vra-man-2
|
2
|
8
|
60
|
|
vra-dem-1
|
2
|
4
|
60
|
|
vra-dem-2
|
2
|
4
|
60
|
|
vra-sql
|
2
|
8
|
60
|
The Host Resources Deep Dive book by 
Like many other geeks out there, I received an Amazon Echo device this Christmas, and whether it’s a fad or not, I’ve spent a few happy hours setting up my Hue lights and some other automation. The room in the house with the most automation is my office – the novelty may wear off, but walking in each morning and saying “Alexa, turn on my office” and having everything wake up for me is really cool.
In this humble consultant’s opinion, Log Insight is one of the most useful tools in the administrator’s tool belt for troubleshooting vRealize Automation. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to help troubleshoot an issue that, when asked, people don’t know which log they should be looking at. The simple fact is that vRealize Automation has a lot of log files. Correlating these log sources to provide an overall picture is a painful, manual process – unless you have Log Insight!