My trip started with a farcical attempt to fly – my 11:50am flight on Sunday didn’t leave ‘til 3:30pm, but in light of William Lam’s travel woes on the same day, I don’t think I’ll complain to heavily. After a quick stop off at the Fira to register and grab my VMworld bag and I headed off to meet DefinIT co-author Simon ( @simoneady ) at our AirBnB apartment (which, by the way is awesome and a whole load cheaper than a hotel).

For the last few years at VMworld I’ve taken advantage of the discounted exam price and booked a “have-a-go” exam – typically an exam I’ve been wanting to do but not necessarily had the time I wanted to study for it. Since I have been fairly immersed in the NSX world for the last week, sitting in an NSX design and deploy class and surrounded by some very smart networking guys, I changed my “have-a-go” exam from the VCP6-CMA to the VCIX-NV.

It’s PEX (Partner Exchange Day) at VMworld today so its busy but not the Tuesday (first day) of VMworld busy, last night saw a fantastic #vRockstar party and a great chance to meet and have a beer with many vTwitteratti.

Today of course has been largely overshadowed by the big new concerning the Dell announcement to purchase EMC which has triggered a great deal of discussion and a healthy amount of banter and snark! It should be interesting to see how it all pans out and tomorrows keynote will have a great deal of interest regarding any comments on the matter.

As a vExpert, I am blessed to get 1000 CPU hours access to Ravello’s awesome platform and recently I’ve been playing with the AutoLab deployments tailored for Ravello.

If you’re unfamiliar with Ravello’s offering (where have you been?!) then it’s basically a custom hypervisor (HVX) running on either AWS or Google Cloud that allows you to run nested environments on those platforms. I did say it’s awesome.

[<img class=“alignright size-medium wp-image-3968” src="/images/2014/02/pernixdata1.png" alt=“pernixdata” width=“300” height=“80” since vSphere 6 was released, simply because I can’t afford to wait on learning new versions until 3rd party software catches up. It makes you truly appreciate the awesome power of FVP, even on my less than spectacular hardware in my lab, when it’s taken away for a while.

Now that FVP 3.0 has GA’d, I’m looking forward to getting my lab storage accelerated - it makes a huge difference.

With a Platform Services Controller appliance deployed as part of a vCenter Server installation, either integrated as part of the vCSA or as a separate PSC appliance, you can easily join the PSC to an Active Directory domain using the Web Client.

When you’ve deployed the PSC as the single sign on layer of a distributed vRealize Automation deployment, you don’t have the vSphere Web Client to configure it in the same way. This means that you can’t add an integrated Active Directory identity source to the default tenant, either using the PSC machine account or an SPN for Kerberos.

Enter a name for the monitor, and leave the other parameters the same. Select the “Special Parameters” tab and configure the send string to the URL to monitor - e.g for the PSC SSO it’s going to be:

For the receive string, enter the expected response (“GREEN”). Click Create.

Assigning a NetScaler Monitor to a Service

Assign the monitor to the PSC Services (or Service Groups) configured for PSC by opening the Configuration > Traffic Management > Load Balancing > Services page and selecting the PSC service for HTTPS/443 and clicking Edit.

Now that the prerequisites for the IaaS layer have been completed, it’s time to move on to the actual installation of the IaaS components, starting with the database. We then move onto the first Web server, which also imports the ModelManagerData configuration to the database, populating the database with all of the info the IaaS layer needs out of the box. We then install the second Web server before moving on to the active Manager server. The second Manager server is passive and the service should be disabled - I’ll cover installing DEM Orchestrators, Workers and the vSphere Agents in the next article.

One of the trickiest parts of deploying vRealize Automation is the IaaS layer - people sometimes look at me like I’m a crazy person when I say that, normally because they’ve deployed a PoC or small deployment with just a single IaaS server. Add in 5 more servers, some load balancers, certificates, a distributed setup and MSDTC to the mix and you have a huge potential for pain!

Having just completed a particularly problem-prone distributed IaaS install, this was almost the straw that broke the camel’s back. Logging into vRealize Automation for the first time as an Infrastructure Admin displayed the infrastructure tab and all menu labels as big ugly references, and no functionality:

{com.cmware.cap.component.iaas.proxy.provider@csp.places.iaas.label }

Rebooting the IaaS web servers restored the functionality of the IaaS layer but still did not fix the label issue, it took a further reboot of both vRealize Automation appliances, then the IaaS web servers to finally view the correct labels.