With the improvements of VCF Automation 9 it now includes a new model which supports developer consumer use cases. In context of the tenancy architecture, it provides 2 different types of organizations: VM-Apps-OrgAn organization which is almost identical to what is known from 8.x versions of Aria Automation. Its main purpose is to support VM-based… Read More »
A while ago I created a blog about creating a customer resource using Aria Orchestrator dynamic types. The example taken was a simple link management solution which leverages the Orchestrator configuration items. In this blog I will use the same example but in a different way. VCF Automation 9 has introduced a “new schema” type… Read More »
VCF Automation 9 introduced 2 types of organizations: VM-Apps-Organization and All-Apps-Organization. The VM-Apps-Organization is almost identical to the 8.x version of Aria Automation and can use the embedded or an external Orchestrator. The All-Apps-Organization is a completely new architecture which relies on Kubernetes APIs. It can use Orchestrator for extensibility, custom resources and other functions… Read More »
In this post, I will discuss the steps required to install the NSX Edges (including routing). The NSX Edges, in conjunction with the Tier-0 logical gateway, form the bridge between the overlay networks (within the SDDC) and the underlay networks (outside the SDDC).
Thanks to Matteo Brioschi for his support for this blog! VCF Automation manages a full deployment cycle from the request of the process until disposal of the resource. In this context the object in question will be tracked as a deployment as long as it exists. Customers can use that deployment to invoke day-2 actions… Read More »
Setting up a VPC, like anything else, needs to be planned and requires a little preparation. However, once the VPC is configured, the VPC user can manage their own environment without putting the network infrastructure at risk. This can reduce the workload on the network team and the security team.
Thanks to Ara Petrosyan, Felix Azizyan, Ani Harutyunyan and Thomas Kopton for their help. One of the most used features in VCF Operations is its integrated capacity management engine. It has comprehensive capabilities to take metrics like HA, buffers and more into consideration and present the remaining capacity automatically. VCF Operations provides a capacity view… Read More »
Thanks to Thomas Kopton for his inputs! VCF Operations provides several management packs to enhance its capabilities for managing external systems. If for a component (e.g. a storage device) no existing management pack is available, customers can use the management pack builder to create a new pack on their own. The beauty of this is… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »