DefinIT

vRA7.2 and vSphere Integrated Containers

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One of the cool new features released with vRealize Automation 7.2 was the integration of VMware Admiral (container management) into the product, and recently VMware made version 1 of vSphere Integrated Containers generally available (GA), so I thought it was time I started playing around with the two.

In this article I’m going to cover deploying VIC to my vSphere environment and then adding that host to the vRA 7.2 container management.

Deploying vSphere Integrated Containers

VIC is deployed using a command line interface, which deploys a vApp and a container host VM onto your ESXi host or vSphere cluster. There are a LOT of different ways to configure VIC so I strongly suggest you read and digest the VIC Installation Guide. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to deploy as basic a setup as I can figure out. [Read more…]

Deploying to AWS with Software Components on vRealize Automation 7

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aws-vra

Recently I’ve been working on some ideas in my lab to leverage the AWS endpoint on vRealize Automation. One of the things I needed to get working was getting Software Components working on my AWS deployed instances.

The diagram to the right shows my end-stage network – the instance deployed by vRA into AWS should be in a private subnet in my VPC, and should use my local lab DNS server and be able to access my vRA instance. This allows me to make use of the vRA guest agent for software components on the deployed VMs. I also wanted to have the deployed VMs use their local NAT gateway for internet traffic, rather than paying for the data over my VPN connection. [Read more…]

Adding a vCloud Air (PAYG/Gen2) instance to vRealize Orchestrator as a vCloud Director host

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vRABig 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. But this still didn’t expose the vCloud Director functionality for those machines. To do this I needed vCloud Air added as a vCloud Director host.

As per Jose’s advice, I duplicated the “com.vmware.library.vCloud.Host/addHost” action, named it “addHost_vCA_G2”:

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I then modified the following line to include “/api/compute”:

newHost.url = "https://" + host + ":" + port;

Becomes

newHost.url = "https://" + host + ":" + port + "/api/compute";

I then duplicated the “Add a connection” workflow to create “Add a connection (vCloud Air Gen2)” and swapped the old action for the new action:

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Now I can add vCloud Air (PAYG/Gen2) as an endpoint in the normal way:

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The out-of-the-box “IaaS vCD VM” Resource Mapping now works in vRA and I can create custom Resource Actions against the vCloud:VM object type.

Once again, big thanks to Jose for this solution!

MindMap: vRealize Automation Roles

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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

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Building a vRealize Automation NSX Lab on Ravello

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imageAs 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.

As an avid home-lab enthusiast Ravello initially felt weird, but having used it for a while I can definitely see the potential to augment, and in some cases completely replace the home lab. I spent some time going through Nigel Poulton’s AWS course on Pluralsight to get a better understanding of the AWS platform and I think that helped, but it’s definitely not required to get started on Ravello.

One more thing to add before I start the setup – even if I didn’t have 1000 hours free, the pricing model means that you could run your lab on Ravello for a fraction of the cost of a higher spec home lab. It’s definitely an option to consider unless you’re running your lab 24/7.

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