Writing about tech and anything else I find interesting

Creating Custom Roles for vRealize Automation

Over the last little while, I’ve been working with a pretty advanced customer of ours. This customer in turn has some pockets of even more advanced business units who have some needs that force me to be particularly creative.

Terraform Provider for vRealize Automation - First Look

For those of you who I speak with in person (or even via Slack) you would know that I have been spending quite a lot of time with Terraform recently. The Infrastructure as Code space is one that I am very interested in, and as part of my learning process I have been helping one of our teams move off a python script used to instantiate nested testing environments, and onto Terraform.

Dynamically Retrieving Compute Resource Locations

One of the most common queries I get is how to make the Location value mandatory. Following closely on the heels of this query is how you can use the Location value as a means of filtering other elements as part of a request. The bad news is that you can’t do either of these things with the default Location dropdown. The good news is that you can work around it with the use of...

Revisiting Multi-Tenancy in vRealize Automation

One of the things that I am asked about at each dot release of vRealize Automation is what changes to multi-tenancy have been introduced. While I took a fairly hard stance on this back in the 6.x days, I am pleased to say that I can hand on heart say that my misgivings have largely been put to bed.

Integrating ADFS with vRealize Automation

I was asked this week about the process for using a SAML provider such as ADFS for authentication in vRA. To start off with, you want to create a new Identity Provider.

Keeping Multiple Disks Together

Often the most basic examples of a request involve a machine with a single disk. In that simple use case, exposing a dropdown to the user to select a specific datastore, datastore cluster or storage policy isn’t onerous.

Property Dictionary Relationships in vRA7

I’ve been working with a number of customers recently to upgrade their environments to vRA7, and one of the most common questions that is coming up is how we can emulate the relationships that were available in 6.x. The good news is that we don’t need to emulate them at all – a method exists for handling these relationships and it is a lot more powerful (and simple!) than the previous XML approach.

Postman Collection for the vRA7 API

If you find yourself needing to validate API calls, it’s handy to have them all ready to go in something like Postman.

Real Single Sign On with vRA7

It appeals to my sense of humour that removing vCenter SSO from vRA has allowed for the introduction of real single sign on in vRA7.

Dynamic Reservation Selection in vRA7

A common question that comes up is whether or not you can select a reservation at request time with vRealize Automation. In previous versions this was pretty clunky, but in 7 it is now pretty straightforward to setup.

Updating vRA Self-signed Certificates with new Self-Signed Certificates

It has been a little over a year since vCAC 6.0 was released, so many folks who have deployed it in their labs, POCs or other environments for testing purposes are likely to have used the self-signed certificates created in the VAMI at install time rather than generating CA certificates. These certificates are only good for ONE YEAR, so I expect many folks will be running into issues soon if these certificates aren’t replaced before...

vRA Appliance Clustering in Under 3 Minutes

Yep, it’s that easy.

Application Director Part 3: Creating a Cloud Provider and Deployment Environment

In the previous post we registered AppD to the vCAC Component Registry. In effect, this makes vCAC aware of AppD, but it doesn’t quite make AppD aware of vCAC. First of all, you need to ensure that you’re working within the appropriate Business Group. It would be rather annoying to get this entire process done and then discover that you couldn’t utilise it because you’d done all of the required steps against the wrong Business...

Enforcing vCAC Service Availability with vCO

I was having a chat with Nathan at work today about this recent post and the fact that the “service availability” is only an informational piece and doesn’t actually enforce access to the service. For some people this is a suitable approach, but for others we need to be able to enforce it. This is especially the case when we start looking at maintenance windows. So what’s the solution? Once again, we turn to vCO....

Defining Service Support Days

I was over on the VMware Communities tonight, as I often am when I need to settle my mind (don’t ask, I have problems) when the following post popped up.

Application Director Part 2: Basic Setup

Following on from the previous post Deploying the Appd OVA, there are a couple more steps before we get onto registering AppD with vCAC. Typically after an OVA deployment you can just browse to the VAMI or Web Interface of whatever you’ve deployed and carry on happily. With AppD (and ITBM for that matter) there are a couple of prompts on the console that we need to take care of first.

Application Director Part 1: OVA Deployment

I’ve always silently cursed people like Brandon Sanderson who begin writing epic multi-part book series and then diverge off on side projects. Unfortunately, I’m now finding myself behaving more and more like that with my blog posts – but now I have an understanding as to why! In this case I was wanting to respond to a request from Stace Carter (@virtualstace) about deploying applications with vCAC – both through native capabilities and also through...

Protecting vCAC Workloads with NSX Security Groups

One of the most tedious processes I had to navigate as both a user and an engineer was to get firewall rules defined and implemented when a new application was due to be provisioned.

Using Brian’s vCAC Prereq Script in an Offline Environment

Time for another “PoC Lesson Learned”. This time I had to overcome the fact that I had no Internet for the environment that I was deploying to. The upside of this was that this meant I didn’t have to fight Windows 2012 over it wanting to automatically upgrade .NET to 4.5.1, the downside was that I couldn’t use Brian Graf’s great prereq script since Windows 2012 looks to download the latest components/features when you try...

Configuring vCAC VA Network Configuration After the Fact

This week is dedicated to a PoC for one of our customers. I’ve come across a few interesting tidbits along the way that I’d like to share – corner cases sure, but they may be of use to somebody. This is the first piece that I came across.

Configuring an External vPostgres Database for vCAC 6.0

This post is going to take you through implementing an external vPostgres database for the vCAC 6.0 Appliance. There are a few situations where you will want to look at doing this, such as deploying a load balanced pair of vCAC Appliances – more on that approach a little later.

Replacing vCAC 6.0 IaaS Certificates

Replacing the self signed certificates for vCAC it not a particularly difficult process, just a tedious one. In this post we’ll take a look at what you need to do to update the certificates on your vCAC IaaS server.

vCAC 6.0 IaaS Installation

Having deployed the vCAC Virtual Appliance(s) we can now move onto the vCAC IaaS server installation.

vCAC 6.0 Virtual Appliance Configuration

Note: This guide has been written for vCloud Automation Center 6.0 (vCAC 6.0) using the following software builds: VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.5.0.5100-1312297_OVF10.ova VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.5.0-1331820.x86_64.iso VMware-Identity-Appliance-2.0.0.0-1445146_OVF10.ova VMware-vCAC-Appliance-6.0.0.0-1445145_OVF10.ova

vCAC 6.0 Virtual Appliance Installation

Replacing vCAC 6.0 Appliance Certificates

I noticed while reading the vCAC documentation that the information to replace your certificates on the appliances was a little light on so decided to take a leaf out of Derek Seaman’s book. This post shamelessly follows the format of the VMware KBs for replacing your vSphere certificates.

vCAC 6.0 Common Installation Issues

I’ve been privileged to be a part of the vCAC Beta Program, and as such I’ve seen a lot of “installation issues”. There have been a few valid bugs, but the vast majority of people have simply failed to RTFM and decided to just have a go – after all, how hard can it be?

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