vra

Sunday Arriving in early on Sunday as the local flight choices are more limited from Bristol than perhaps a larger Airport, very fortunate to have a hotel so close to the VMworld venue, perhaps not so great for the evening activities but I am happy with it this way around. Other than registration (4pm-8pm) and hopefully catching up with a few folk who have also arrived early. In the evening I had the pleasure to meet many awesome people from the vCommunity.

Having missed last years VMworld I feel very ready for attending the EMEA VMworld in Barcelona. I almost felt annoyed about missing last year as the big announcements really caused a stir in the community and wider afield. (VMware on AWS) The announcements from the US VMworld this year were equally exciting so I am very keen to hear what else VMware has planned to reveal in a Barcelona. I have put a good deal of effort into planning what I will be doing and attending to maximise my time there without burnout (Veterans I hear you laughing)

I already have a vRealize Orchestrator workflow to shutdown my workload cluster. What I want to do is trigger that by a voice command from Alexa. Now, the correct and proper thing to do here would be to create a new Alexa skill, write the function in Lambda and connect that to my Orchestrator REST API and execute the workflow. That way I could control the “intents” and “utterances” and have verbal feedback.

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!

Although it’s fairly limited, you can add AWS as an endpoint for vRealize Automation 7 and consume EC2 AMIs as part of a blueprint. You can even add the deployed instances to an existing Elastic Load Balancer at deploy time. In this post I’ll run through the basics to get up and running and deploy your first highly available (multiple Availability Zone, load balanced) blueprint. Preparing AWS for use as a vRA endpoint There are some obvious pre-requisites for attaching an AWS endpoint - for example, you need to have a VPC configured.

Big thanks to Jose Luis Gomez for this solution, his response to my tweet was spot on and invaluable! I’ve been trying to configure vCloud Air as a vCloud Director host in vRealize Orchestrator in order to create some custom resource actions for Day 2 operations in vRealize Automation. What I found was that there’s *very* little information out there on how to do this, and I ended up writing my own custom resource mapping for the virtual machines to VCAC:VirtualMachine objects - at least that way I could add my resource action.

<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-6186” src="/images/2015/07/vRA-Product-Icon-Mac_0.png" alt=“vRA” width=“150” height=“150” - a properties object. I wanted to create a workflow that I could enable to log all of the keys, values and types of the properties object for each stage of the vRA7 MachineProvisioning workflows, and create a reference for myself on the payload for each stage. To do this I created a new workflow “debugProperties” and added an input variable called “payload”, type Properties.

VMware KB2140539 where requesting an XaaS (vRealize Orchestrator) blueprint fails with: Failed to retrieve form from provider The KB describes it occuring when “more than one VMware vRealize Orchestrator instance is configured for different tenants”. The issue I faced is not the same - in my case, I had the system default tenant configured to use the embedded vRO, and the customer tenant configured to use the system default (which would be the embedded vRO!

The new Event Broker service in vRA7 is one of the most exciting features of this latest release, the possibilities for extensibility are huge. At this point it time you can still use the old method of using workflow stubs to customise machine lifecycle events, but at some point in the future this will be deprecated and the Event Broker will be the only way to extend. With this in mind, I wanted to use the Event Broker to do something that I am asked on almost every customer engagement - custom hostnames beyond what the Machine Prefixes mechanism can do.

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