vRA 7.2 DIG – 07, Initial Tenant Configuration

Automation, Cloud, Install Guide, Tech200, Tech300, VMware, vRA, vRA DIG3 Comments

vIDM is policy-driven and adds a significant amount capability over the IDVA. vRA 7 customers will gain many of the OOTB capabilities of the stand-alone vIDM product and be able to configure and manage these features directly with the vRA UI. For anyone who has used vIDM as a stand-alone solution or as part of another product (e.g. Horizon Workspace), configuring vIDM will be just as straight forward. But even if you’ve never configured it before, it is intuitive and walks you through the logical steps of setting up auth sources and advanced policies…

For Active Directory integration, vIDM Directories are configured to sync with one or more domains.

…

vRA 7.2 DIG – 05, Deployment Wizard

Automation, Install Guide, Tech200, Tech300, Technical, VMware, vRA, vRA DIG5 Comments

The Deployment Wizard is invoked by logging into the primary VA’s Virtual Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) using the configured root account. Once logged in, the admin is immediately presented with the new Deployment Wizard UI. The wizard will provide a choice of a minimal (POC, small) or enterprise (HA, distributed) deployment then, based on the desired deployment type, will walk you through a series of configuration details needed for the various working parts of vRA, including all the windows-based IaaS components and dependencies. For HA deployments, all the core components are automatically clustered and made highly-available based on these inputs.

In both Minimal and Enterprise deployments, the IaaS components (Manager Service, Web Service, DEMs, and Agents) are automatically pushed to available windows IaaS servers made available to the installer thanks to the management agent.

More Details: https://www.virtualjad.com/2015/10/vrealize-automation-7-part-3-the-deployment-wizard.html

Checklist:

  • Log in to VAMI of Primary Appliance (vrava01)
  • Initiate Installation Wizard when prompted
  • Follow the prompts to complete a distributed installation
  • Validate services are started

Video

…

vRA 7.2 DIG – 04, Prepare IaaS Hosts

Automation, Install Guide, Tech200, Tech300, Technical, VMware, vRA, vRA DIG4 Comments

vRA’s IaaS engine is a .net-based application that is installed on a number of dedicated Windows machines. In the old days, the IaaS components were manually installed, configured and registered with the vRA appliance(s). This included manual installation of many prerequisites. The effort was quite tedious and error-prone, especially in a large distributed environment.

In vRA 7.0 and higher, the installation and configuration of system prerequisites and IaaS components has been fully automated by the Deployment Wizard. But prior to kicking off the wizard, the vRA Management Agent needs to be installed on each IaaS host. Once installed, the host is registered with the primary virtual appliance and made available for IaaS installation during the deployment. While the Deployment Wizard will automatically push most of the prerequisites (after a prerequisite check), you have the option to install any or all of the prereqs ahead of time. However, the wizard’s success rate has improved greatly and is the preferred method for most environments.

Exception: Java (64-bit) is required on all the IaaS hosts and cannot be pushed by the deployment wizard. As a prerequisite to installing IaaS, you must install a supported 64-bit version of Java and add the “JAVA_HOME” system variable on each host.…

vRA 7.2 DIG – 03, Deploy vRA Virtual Appliances

Automation, Install Guide, Tech200, Tech300, Technical, VMware, vRA, vRA DIG1 Comment

The vRA virtual appliance (OVA) is downloaded from vmware.com and deployed to a vSphere environment. In a distributed deployment, you will deploy both primary and secondary nodes ahead of kicking off the deployment wizard.

The VA also includes the latest IaaS installers, including the required management agent (that will be covered in the next section).

Checklist:

  • Download and Deploy vRA OVA (x2) to vSphere
  • Configure VA properties
  • Confirm Time settings
  • Confirm accessibility post deployment
  • Confirm DNS Resolution

Video

…

vRA 7.2 DIG – 02, Deploy and Configure VMware NSX

Automation, Install Guide, Tech200, Tech300, VMware, vRA, vRA DIG

We will be leveraging VMware NSX in this implementation to provide the load balancing services for the vRA deployment as well as integrating into vRA for application-centric network and security. Before any of this is possible, we must deploy NSX to the vSphere cluster, prepare the hosts, and configure logical network services. The guide assumes the use of NSX for these services, but this is NOT a requirement. A distributed installation of vRA can be accomplished with most load balancers. VMware certifies NSX, F5, and NetScaler.

(You can skip this section if you do not plan on using NSX in your environment)

Checklist:

  • Deploy (3) NSX Controller Nodes
  • Prep vSphere Hosts
  • Complete Logical Network Preparation
  • Configure VXLAN Network
  • Configure Transport Zone

Video

…

vRA 7.2 DIG – 01, Introduction

Automation, Install Guide, Tech200, Tech300, Technical, VMware, vRA, vRA DIG

vRA 7.x focuses a lot on the user experience (UX), starting with one of the most critical — deploying the solution — then the second most critical, configuring it.  Following through with the promise of a more streamlined deployment experience, vRA 7’s release made a significant UX leap with the debut of the wizard-driven and completely automated installation of the entire platform and automated initial configuration.  And all of this in a significantly reduced deployment architecture.

The overall footprint of vRA has been drastically reduced. For a typical highly-available 6,x implementation, you would need at least 8 VA’s to cover just the core services (not including IaaS/windows components and the external App Services VA). In contrast, vRA 7’s deployment architecture brings that all down to a single pair of VA’s for core services. Once deployed, just 2 load-balanced VA’s will deliver vRA’s framework services, Identity Manager (SSO/vIDM), vPostgres DB, vRO, and RabbitMQ — all clustered and configurable behind a single load balance VIP and a single SSL cert. All that goodness, now down to 2 VA’s and all done automatically (!) during deployment.

While the IaaS (.net) components remain external, several services have moved to the VA(s). This will continue to be the case over time as more and more services make it over — eventually eliminating the Windows dependencies all together.…

vRA 7.2 Detailed Implementation Guide

Automation, Cloud, Install Guide, NSX, Tech200, Tech300, Technical, VMware, vRA, vRA DIG, VSAN14 Comments

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.…