VMware

Just a quick little post this morning! Anyone who works with the vRealize Automation APIs should definitely check out Grant Orchard and Roman Tarnavski’s awesome little side project, Platypus .

It only took me a couple of minutes to get it running on my MacBook - here’s how!

Download and install AppCatalyst

Open a new terminal window

Create a new VM called “photon"

As you will see the upgrade is simple and even though its early days I haven’t seen anything that has been broken!

If you are interested in seeing an example of the new utilization dashboard scroll to the bottom of this article.

Upgrading from 6.1

I will be doing this upgrade on a VA so to begin with I will need the vRealize Operations Manager - Virtual Appliance Operating System upgrade .pak file (Realize_Operations_Manager-VA-OS-6.2.0.3445569.pak)

vRealize Operations 6.2 was released last night and is now available for download!

Looking at what’s new very quickly there are some good new enhancements but when you compare this to the 6.1 release it’s perhaps a little light, nevertheless there appears to be some new cool features and enhancements to be had in this version.

There does not appear to be any sizing/scale increases.

Upgrading from existing 6.1 versions can be done via a .pak file.

For the last few months and certainly very recently (at the London VMUG meeting) I have had the chance to talk to peers and #vExperts and share “war stories” with regards to vRealize Operations Manager.

What has become a consistent theme in all the stories is just how much compute resources vROps requires when you “go big” and not just what is clearly defined in the sizing spreadsheet.

For example some of the large deployments I have either been involved in or heard about (to monitor upwards and beyond of 30000 VMs) required the deployment of Large vROps nodes.

A series of webcasts on vRealize Operations Manager 6.x, helping you learn about anything and everything about the solution. Some of the examples include, vROps Policies, Alert Definitions, Automated Action Framework, integration to third party etc. This would include power point and live demonstrations. The session would range anywhere between 60 to 90 minutes.

With 100+ registrations and more than 70 live attendees, it was definitely a great start to this series. On popular demand of many who could not attend the session due to time-zone differences, we have recorded the session and you can watch the same right here. It is recommended that you watch the video in HD quality for a great experience.

If you use the in-built vRealize Orchestrator instance shipped with the vRealize Automation appliance then you might run into this issue when working with the REST client:

Connection pool shut down (Workflow:Get-IdentityToken / Scripting (item3)#14)

The vRA appliance version I have (6.2 - note to self, need to update lab!) includes the plugin version 1.0.4 for REST. According to the release notes, this was fixed in 1.0.5 - typical!

I use mind maps quite a lot for study, I find the visual representation of info makes it a lot easier for me to remember! Below is a mind map I created for learning the roles in vRealize Automation, which I used during my presentation for #vBrownBag on VCP6-CMA objective 2.

You can download a PDF version here: vRealize Automation Roles Mind Map

Apologies in advance if this is post is a jumbled nonsense, I’m still way too excited!

This morning I woke to the news that I have passed my VCDX-CMA!

This was my second attempt at VCDX and although the first failure was a painful experience, the lessons learned from it were invaluable to take into the defence the second time around. Failing doesn’t have to be a negative experience - if there is one thing that I will take from the VCDX program it is that there is ALWAYS more I need to learn, and I can always do better. Learning has to be a way of life (in this industry especially!) and the minute you stop, you start falling back.

Wednesday

I had lined up several sessions so I was quick to get along to my first session - Operational Remediation with vRealize Operations… Tying it All Together - #MGT5735. The session was excellent and gave a great overview and introduction to what is possible with remediation in vROps 6.1. Big thanks to Chima Njaka for this session.

Aside from a few other sessions I spent a lot of the afternoon in the VMUG lounge with my colleagues from @xtravirt (see pic below) and meeting lots of other folk from the around the globe (this is what makes this conference so very great for me), putting faces to twitter handles for the first time and so on. Networking with your peers at an event such as this is incredibly valuable, educational and really enjoyable.

@vaficionado) – if that list of names doesn’t fill you with confidence for vRA.Next, then I suggest you follow them on twitter and trust me that it’s a crack team!

So, my highlights:

1. Completely automated deployment…almost. The deployment of appliances and installation of IaaS components and pre-requisites will be wizard driven, the Window Servers will need to exist and have an agent installed, and the MSSQL server will also need to be installed. Anyone who’s done a distributed vRA install will know that this is a massive improvement over the current state of affairs.
2. The vRealize Automation appliances will be clustered automatically for core services such as identity, cafe (portal), vPostgres and embedded vRealize Orchestrator (Embedded vRO is now recommended for production).
3. A new identity service. No more vSphere SSO or PSC – VMware Identity Management (vIDM) is a new, highly scalable and performing federated identity platform. Any SAML identity source, and more than 3m users supported per source.
4. An initial setup wizard that creates your first tenant, configuring things like fabric groups, business groups and vSphere endpoints automatically. It will even import your existing vSphere templates as clone blueprints.
5. The old CDK is gone! Instead you can use any event within vRA that is pushed through the RabbitMQ message bus to trigger extensibility through workflow subscriptions.
6. vRealize Orchestrator has a new HTML5 Control Center which is your single admin point for plugin configuration as well as adding metrics and monitoring for all workflows being executed.
7. There’s no need for unique tenant URLs – the new vIDM platform allows a single logon interface for all tenants. (Though you can keep your URLs if you want!)
8. vIDM can also be used to control authentication from IP source, e.g. to restrict logon to a specific subnet regardless of whether the credentials are valid or not. This has some cool ramifications for having the web layer in a DMZ, for example.
9. Functionality is slowly being migrated from the old IaaS/DynamicOps layer to the appliance – this is fantastic news. The migrated portions (such as vSphere Endpoint configuration) are now accessible through the vRA API, as well as gaining the speed and stability that the appliances provide.
10. The new blueprint designer is awesome. Added to that what was AppD is now called App Services and allows you to take a base blueprint (e.g. a CentOS VM) and drag and drop software components that you’ve scripted on top (e.g. Apache, then PHP). You can also drag and drop XaaS (vRO workflows) onto the blueprint, as well as existing blueprints to create nested blueprints.
11. Much fuller integration between NSX and vRA. There’s a whole raft of improvements in the integration between vRA and NSX – e.g. you can drag a new routed network onto a blueprint and it will automatically create a new Logical Switch and Distributed Logical Router to attach the Logical Switch to. Similarly load balancing applications is a drag and drop operation, as is applying existing security groups.
12. All blueprints can be imported and exported in YAML, which opens up exciting possibilities for storing versioned blueprints and retrieving programmatically.
13. There are over 60 lifecycle events out of the box on which you can trigger Orchestrator workflows, but you can create custom filters based on properties and events to extend functionality – the only limitation is what you can imagine!

There are still several months of development to go between now and the GA of vRA 7 and the development seems to be moving at a great pace. Between beta 1 and beta 2 there was a huge amount of change, and even the version demoed today had new features and UI.