Author Archives: Christian Ferber

About Christian Ferber

Christian has joined VMware in July 2015 as Senior Systems Engineer Cloud Management. Through his work in various cloud projects before and at VMware he has gained experience in datacenter, server, storage, networking and cloud management technologies. Today his primary focus is on automation and operation topics with integration into many surrounding solutions like containers, configuration management, directory services and others. He is responsible for the management components in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) product family for enterprise customers in Germany.

1-node Kubernetes Template for CentOS Stream 9 in VCF Automation

By | 30. September 2024

For testing and demo purposes it is very helpful to easily and quickly deploy a Kubernetes installation with very low resource consumption. This blog post is following-up on an older post that explains how to set up a single-node Kubernetes deployment. Over time there have been innovations like newer operating systems or Kubernetes versions that… Read More »

Aria Automation custom resources with dynamic types

By | 9. August 2024

Thanks to Thomas Kopton for his help on this topic! Aria Automation has a high number of out-of-the-box resource types reaching from virtual machines, over volumes up to security groups. Customers however in many cases would like to add their own resources as well and manage them. To do this you need to have what… Read More »

Database-as-a-Service with Data Services Manager and Aria Automation

By | 4. July 2024

Special thanks to Thomas Sauerer for his great support! One important note upfront: The here shown integration with Aria Automation is primarily for demo purposes showing the capabilities of the platform rather than for production use. In the upcoming release Broadcom will focus on a more comprehensive integration with Aria Automation Cloud Consumption Interface. Building… Read More »

OVA/OVF as a Service in Aria Automation using new Deployment Overview

By | 21. June 2024

The service catalog of Aria Automation can contain services of all flavors from classic virtual machines up to network services. One common ask from customers is to provide services for OVA/OVF appliances which can be requested by the consumer. Those appliances usually are purpose-built and do have specific parameters required for the deployment. Also, they… Read More »

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 »

Troubleshoot Aria Operations host power metric

By | 4. August 2023

Big thanks to Valentin Bondzio for his support writing this article Aria Operations helps customers to get metrics related to their datacenter sustainability. It captures energy consumption data from vCenter and allows for functionality like customized reporting, break down to workloads, assignment to business units and more. For example, customers can create a report that… 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 »

Aria Guardrails – enable elevated access for AWS

By | 21. July 2023

VMware recently introduced a new solution Aria Guardrails which allows for central policy management and desired state configuration in public clouds. With this you e.g. could automatically enforce a password policy in your public cloud accounts without touching every account and monitoring it manually for drifts. The product so far has only been able to… 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 »