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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Special thanks to Christian Liebner and Jürgen Mutzberg for the joint work on this blog! Kubernetes is becoming more important in IT world. vRealize Automation has multiple ways to consume Kubernetes clusters reaching from Namespace-as-a-Service in Cloud Assembly up to full Kubernetes application in Codestream. For all those use cases it is required to have… Read More »
Before going into the details I would like to express my thanks to Andreas Diemer, Martin Kosturkov and Christian Liebner for their support in development and testing! Infrastructure as a Service is one of the key use cases of the VMware vRealize Automation solution. While there’s comprehensive ways to create simple or advanced blueprints, customers… Read More »
Now that the next generation of vRealize Automation has been released I would like to have a closer look on the new use cases being addressed. Most of you probably know that vRealize Automation can be consumed in two flavors in this new model: vRealize Automation Cloud – consumed as Software-as-a-Service vRealize Automation 8.x –… Read More »