Category Archives: Aria Automation

Approval with Jira change ticket

By | 4. January 2024

Aria Automation has out-of-the-box capabilities for an approval workflow. When implemented, users can approve requests within the Aria Automation interface. In addition, there’s many options to integrate 3rd party tools of different type into a provisioning process. A lot of our customers are asking for integration options into Atlassian Jira. Jira has multiple functionalities from… Read More »

Automated SaltStack Minion Updates through winrepo

By | 9. November 2023

This blog article is a follow-up to the previous article that explains a different way to do minion updates. For Windows minions there’s an even easier method to run the update automatically. This is by using winrepo. Winrepo is a mechanism provided by SaltStack to build a package manager like yum or apt on Linux.… Read More »

Automated SaltStack Minion Updates

By | 27. October 2023

First, thanks to Patrick Moffitt and David Fidler for their help on this topic! Aria Automation includes a configuration management solution based on SaltStack technology – called Aria Automation Config. It’s integrated into the design canvas and is part of a full provisioning process from VM OS up to application level. SaltStack consists of a… Read More »

Self-Service Aria Guardrails Policy in Aria Automation

By | 27. July 2023

VMware Aria Guardrails is a central policy management system with desired state principle and primary focus on public clouds. It consists of several templates that easily can be used by the admin to apply his desired policy on public clouds. One of the templates is for AWS IAM management to define the password policy (like… Read More »

Custom Ansible Day-2 action in Aria Automation

By | 15. May 2023

Aria Automation (aka vRealize Automation) has a built-in support for Ansible open-source and Ansible Tower / Ansible Automation Platform. Once a cloud account is defined for Ansible, customers can add Ansible elements to the design canvas and combine them with virtual machine objects. In this case after provisioning a virtual machine, an ansible playbook or… Read More »

3-tier app including application and security with Aria Automation and SaltStack

By | 3. April 2023

Before we start: Thanks to David Fidler for his in-depth SaltStack knowledge and Thomas Kopton for the heavy lifting of the MS SQL installation! Aria Automation (aka vRealize Automation) is a comprehensive automation solution that can deliver full application stacks with a desired state templating model. It has various integrations e.g. with vCenter, NSX and… Read More »

Custom Azure Private Endpoint Service for SQL in Aria Automation

By | 15. December 2022

Aria Automation (aka vRealize Automation) provides a wide variety of supported public cloud services out of the box. Through the design canvas they can be added by drag and drop, configured with the appropriate parameters/inputs and subsequently exposed in the catalog for consumption. Considering the broad services public clouds offer and the high innovation rate,… Read More »

Custom categories with ServiceNow Plugin and Aria Automation

By | 29. November 2022

Customers using Aria Automation (aka vRealize Automation) can integrate with external consumption portals like ServiceNow to e.g., use a corporate standard for requesting resources. For ServiceNow specifically, VMware provides a plugin that integrates with Aria Automation and can be downloaded from the ServiceNow store (search for vRealize). After installation, it by default creates categories called… Read More »

Configure roles in Cloud Extensibility Proxy (vRO 8.x)

By | 1. August 2022

Thanks to Daniel Vatov for your help on this blog! vRealize Orchestrator 8.x provides a security model with different roles. As access to vRO is done through vRA roles and authentication, a mapping between roles on vRA side and vRO must take place. While this is described for vRA 8.x here, the same procedure will… Read More »

Manage templates with vSphere content library and vRA 8

By | 11. July 2022

First, I’d like to express my thanks to Jie Shang and Alexander Summerauer who helped in creating the content for this blog. vRealize Automation is architected to manage globally spread infrastructures. Some customers use it to manage their resources in multiple locations within a distinct country by 1 vCenter, some customers have their infrastructures in… Read More »

Manage vCenter, ESX, NSX etc. with SaltStack

By | 28. January 2022

VMware has aquired SaltStack a while ago and incorporated some of the products into the vRealize Automation product family. While most of the configuration management functionality focusses on guest operating systems there has been increasing demand to do the same for VMware SDDC components like vCenter, ESX, NSX etc. as well.  As of this VMware… Read More »

Integrate SaltStack Appliance with GIT

By | 11. August 2021

vRealize Automation 8.x includes SaltStack Config as configuration management tool. This works with state files that define which configurations will be applied on target system. One of the options to store state files is leveraging a git repository. In this blog I will explain how the SaltStack appliance can be configured to leverage such a… Read More »

Using vRA Terraform Service in air-gapped environment

By | 20. July 2021

Since vRealize Automation 8.2 the product includes blueprints that can leverage Terraform services. The implementation leverages a Kubernetes cluster where it creates a temporary pod which loads some data from the internet. For some customers it’s mandatory to have no internet connection in the datacenter. Hence a solution is required that can run in a… Read More »

Set Deployment Name to VM Name

By | 7. July 2021

The most common use case implemented with vRealize Automation is classic Infrastructure-as-a-Service for VMs. vRealize Automation has the concept of a Deployment that can contain multiple objects incl. network, security and multiple VMs. Although this is the target architecture most of our customers are planning to reach, for many of them their first use case… Read More »

Dynamic Network Selection in request form with vRealize Automation 8 (part 2)

By | 21. May 2021

In one of my previous blogs, I explained how a network selection on blueprint request can be implemented: https://www.vrealize.it/2020/06/25/vrealize-automation-network-selection-in-request-form/ As always there’s multiple ways to achieve goals. The above-mentioned blog is using custom properties to realize the network selection. This has the general advantage that the process could be used for other selections as well… Read More »

Self-Service user onboarding in vRealize Automation

By | 17. December 2020

vRealize Automation 8/Cloud provides a comprehensive platform to offer service as part of a catalog experience. Users that have been assigned to projects and catalog items can select from the services available and request those accordingly. If new users want to get access to the platform typically an admin user must grant them permissions to… Read More »

Integration of vRealize Automation with Keycloak authentication

By | 13. November 2020

Beforehand I would like to express my thanks to Sascha Warno for his help in configuring the Keycloak integration. vRealize Automation 8 is leveraging VMware Identity Manager for authentication of users. While in most environments Identity Manager is integrated with LDAP directory services like Microsoft Active Directory, it supports a wide variety of other identity… Read More »

Push Blueprints to GIT Repo

By | 16. October 2020

Beforehand I would like to express my thanks to Ismail Yilmaz and Christian Liebner for their help in developing modules and verification of the solution. vRealize Automation 8.x and vRealize Automation Cloud do have integration with gitlab and github for source code management. As of today, this is only a one-way process to pull blueprints from the SCM system into vRA –… Read More »

Dynamic Network Selection in request form with vRealize Automation 8

By | 25. June 2020

Special thanks go to Martin Petkov for his help on API questions. Self-Service offerings typically bring up the question: Who’s the consumer for the services offered? While in many cases this might be some type of end-users who don’t care much where the service is running there’s also a lot of use cases where skilled… Read More »

Kubernetes Application Deployment with Codestream

By | 4. June 2020

Deployment of a Kubernetes application into production requires a well-defined process. It is not only about the actual deployment but also about having the right test procedure in place as well as updating existing applications with new versions. In contrast to legacy applications where frequency of updates is rather low, modern containerized applications can have… Read More »