Welcome to the vRealize Automation 7.2 Detailed Implementation Guide (DIG). This series of posts — made up of detailed how-to, end-to-end videos, plenty of commentary, and other related content — was put together to help you deploy and configure a highly-available, production-worthy vRealize Automation 7.2 distributed environment, complete with SDDC integration (e.g. VSAN, NSX), extensibility examples and ecosystem integrations. The design assumes VMware NSX will provide the load balancing capabilities and includes details on deploying and configuring NSX from from scratch to deliver these capabilities.

This little project has been in the works for quite some time and will continue to expand as I include additional how-to’s for a variety of use cases (e.g. IPAM and ITSM integration).

Target Audience

This guide was created for anyone looking to install and/or configure vRealize Automation 7.2 in any environment. And, as were my intentions in previous POC guides, the content here can be used as a form of training and education or simply a reference document for existing or new vRA environments.

As for skill level, this guide assumes you have a general idea of vRealize Automation and VMware’s broader Cloud Management products. However there is no expectation that you’ve previously deployed and configured vRA.

Bill of Materials

What you need to be prepared with depends on your own objectives and the extent of which you want to implement vRA. The guide can be used for a basic POC on 2 nodes (1 x vRA VA, 1 x IaaS / Windows VM), or to deploy a highly-available distributed architecture (2 x vRA VA’s, 4 x IaaS VMs). While the guide assumes the latter (distributed), you can easily apply the steps to a minimal POC.

In either case, most of the prerequisites and external dependancies for the core implementation remain the same:

  • vCenter / vSphere Web Client
  • A healthy vSphere Cluster
  • vRA Virtual Appliance (OVA download)
  • Windows 2012 R2 VM
  • Active Directory
  • DNS
  • Microsoft SQL Server

Optional (integration covered in detail, but optional to deploy)

  • VMware NSX (for load balancing and app-centric networking)
  • Virtual SAN

Getting Started

The chapters (sections) are laid in subsequent order and will often refer back to completed configuration tasks from a previous chapter, so I’d recommend completing one section before moving on to the next.

The Introduction gets into much more detail and sets the stage for jumping in. If you prefer an all-video option, the first series of videos have been published in the video guide.

Table of Contents

Feedback

I love hearing back from you…it’s what keeps me motivated to build this stuff. Please leave your comments, questions, or other feedback as you work your way through the guide. You can also catch me on twitter.

Also note that while I do in fact represent vRealize Automation as part of my primary responsibilities at VMware, this guide is not intended to replace or supersede any official product documentation, best practice, or guidance provided by VMware.

Let’s get started…ENJOY!

 

+++++
@virtualjad

14 Comments

  1. Hi Jad,

    Greetings! I would like to know if esxi host patching possible using vRA blueprint. I cannot find any article on google regarding host patching using vRA.

  2. Hi Jad,

    Amazing series. Wondering if below sessions were Video recorded too ?

    vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 13.1, VSAN (SPBM) Integration
    vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 13.2, NSX Integration
    vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 14, vRealize Business

  3. vRA 7.2 D.I.G – 06.2, Configure DRS — There is no link or video annexed to this.

    Can you please let us know the details of the same?

  4. Hi Jad

    Amazing article. I wanted to know if there is a limit on the no. of Endpoints that can be connected to vRA 7.2, 7.3, specially in the case of vCenter and Hyper-V (SCVMM). I couldn’t find anything on this.

    Thanks

  5. Great article and videos. Can you post video for replacing self certificates with CA signed certificates ?

  6. Hello sir, After a successful VRA deployment. Is it best to use VRA to manage the vsphere environment rather than vcenter web client? Can you use both to spin up vm’s delete, manage or will consistency issues arise ?

    • @Sam – that depends if pulling admins out of vCenter is one of your target use cases. vRA does not have feature parity with vCenter when it comes to managing clusters/hosts/vms natively (and it’s not designed to do do). But several customers use vRA to control access to vCenter and even add governance, extensibility, etc…certainly a good thing if that’s what you’re looking for.

  7. thanks for the quick guide. i tried this at my homelab and deployment went pretty good. I am kinda seeing some issues after the deployment though not sure if i missed something.
    I can see all the compute resources from the endpoint/fabric groups. At collection level, they are all unchecked and even if i turn it on, they wont turn on for data collection. have you seen that before?

Comments are closed.