A very frequently asked topic for VCF Automation is how to execute a script post provisioning of a VM. This usually is leveraged to invoke post deployment processes like configuration tasks, installation of agents or even middleware deployments. Customers also use it to bridge the gap to configuration management tools. There are multiple ways to… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »