The recommendations for the vRealize Appliance have changed with 6.2, the published reference architecture now does not recommend using an external Postgres database (either vPostgres appliance, a 3rd party Postgres deployment or using a third vRealize Appliance as a stand-alone database installation). Instead the recommended layout is shown in the diagram below. One instance of postgres on the primary node becomes an active instance, replicating to the second node which is passive. In front of these a load balancer or DNS entry points to the active node only. Fail-over is still a manual task, but it does provide better protection than a single instance.

The cafe portal and APIs are still load balanced in an active/active configuration and are clustered together.

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Having just welcomed VMTurbo on board as a blog sponsor, I thought I’d do a quick posting on how to deploy their free Virtual Health Monitor appliance.

Sign up for a free license here and download the appropriate version

Deploy the VMTurbo Appliance

Deploying the appliance is simply a case of importing the OVA downloaded. There’s nothing really to configure and it took 61 seconds in my lab environment, so it’s pretty quick! Network configuration is via DHCP and you can configure a static IP by logging into the console and running “ipsetup”

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I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.

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For several months now we have seen glimpses of vROps by way of limited blog posts and the HOL demo’s so it was great to see it finally released.

So what is it like out of the box?

vROps 6.0 Release notes

The first clear change is the move away from 2 VMs in a vAPP and consolidation down to 1 VM which is then easily scalable to more as you require.

The UI has been completely reworked and the install process has also completely changed, so lets take a look.

vROps 6.0 OVF download

Deploying from the ovf is very straight forward (you no longer need to worry about IP Pools either!)

Once you have deployed the OVF start up the VM and wait for it to complete its boot process then navigate to the IP you gave vROps to begin the deployment/configuration. As you can/will see below a lot of time has been invested to simplifying the configuration process.

Get started!

I Opted to do a new a new installation upon which I was then presented with a 5 step process to deploy vROps

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This is the fourth article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model.

By the end of this post we will have deployed a second vCAC Appliance, clustered it with the first appliance and registered the load balanced URL with the Identity Appliance. This will mean logging on to https://vcloud.definit.local/shell-ui-app will be successful.

vCAC deployment with clustered and load balanced vCAC Appliances

An overview of the steps required are below:

• Issue and install certificates
• Deploy an external vPostgres appliance and migrate the vCAC database
• Configure load balancing
• Deploy a second vCAC appliance and configure clustering
• Install and configure additional IaaS server
• Deploy vCenter Orchestrator Appliance cluster

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This is the second part of the 3rd article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model.

By the end of this part, we will not have modified the vCAC deployment in any way, we’ll just have 3 configured load balanced URLs

vCAC Simple Install with vPostgres deployed and load balancers prepared

An overview of the steps required are below:

• Issue and install certificates
• Deploy an external vPostgres appliance and migrate the vCAC database
• Configure load balancing
• Deploy a second vCAC appliance and configure clustering
• Install and configure additional IaaS server
• Deploy vCenter Orchestrator Appliance cluster

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According to VMware, Infrastructure Navigator is

…a component of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. It automatically discovers application services, visualizes relationships and maps dependencies of applications on virtualized compute, storage and network resources.

Effectively it takes a look at the network connections that are running between your VMs (and physical servers) and works out which applications and services are running on each, and the dependencies – both upstream and downstream – for each VM.

This is particularly useful in large enterprise environments where perhaps application developers have not (shock) documented the dependencies for a particular application. I can think of several times when I’ve been 100% confident that (according to all the documentation provided) I can decommission a server, or the service running on a server, only to have to turn it back on due to a production outage – because an un-documented dependency exists.

Effectively, Infrastructure Navigator leverages VMware Tools to run a netstat command on each VM and work out what connections are being used. It comes with a library of already classified services – e.g. MSSQL running on port 1433 is a pretty obvious service. Non-classified services (or services configured for running on a non-standard port) can be easily added to the library to build up a detailed picture of which VMs depend on each other (as well as “unmanaged” servers/services that are out of the scope of vCenter). (more…)

With the release of vCenter Log Insight Public Beta (http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vcenter/vcenter-log-insight) I thought I’d strike while the iron is hot and run through the installation and configuration.

Deploying the OVF

This is such a bread and butter task that it doesn’t require more than a few words – it’s definitely worth looking at the Sizing PDF before you deploy (VMware-vCenter-Log-Insight-1.0-Beta-Virtual-Appliance-Sizing.pdf) as it’s not small even for a test installation. If you’re using less than the recommended 8GB RAM there are additional steps to change the heap size for performance. (more…)

So VMware’s Support Assistant is pretty awesome and it’s free! I thought I’d do a quick run through of the installation and set up for anyone who was interested, it’s fairly straightforward and if you raise a lot of calls or have multiple calls on the go it’s a time saver!

VMware’s official page for the Support Assistant is here – https://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-support-assistant/overview.html (more…)