vrealize automation

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.

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.

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

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. 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.

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: GET /websso/HealthStatus 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.

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! If you’ve followed my previous posts, you’ll see know that I’ve got a HA Platform Services Controller configured, and a HA vRealize Appliance cluster configured with Postgres replication - all good so far.

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.

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.