VMware vRealize Lifecycle Manager 1,2 Released

This release of vRSLCM 1.2 extends its lifecycle management capabilities to infrastructure and IT content.The new integrated marketplace delivers an “App Store” like experience for customers to easily consume out-of-the-box content curated by VMware and ecosystem partners.
The new content management capability allows IT teams to treat infrastructure content in a way similar to how developers treat applications, and enables end-to-end content lifecycle management with its pre-built CI/CD type-pipelines.

Below are the new capabilities of vRSLCM

• Integrated Marketplace
• Content Management
• Pre-Built Content Pipeline
• Source Control and Versioning
• Content Deployment Support 

To know more about it, follow the links below 

Release Notes 
VMware Blogs 
Download LifeCycle Manager 

Most awaited vRealize Automation 7.4 is released

Today VMWare released it’s new enhanced version of vRealize Automation which bundled with most awaited features and functionality

Few of the highlighted features are as below

- Custom Request Forms Designer

- Now can Deploy From OVF

- improvements to CloudClient to handle stuck VMs

More useful links are as follows

Release Notes

Download vRealise Automation 7.4

Documentation for vRA 7.4

vRealize Automation 7.2 - Distributed Deployment

vRealize Automation 7.2 - Distributed Deployment

I guess this is most of us are trying to build with robust vRA 7.2 highly available deployment as compared with vRA 6.x version. This vRA 7.2 utilized HAProxy for their internal components Load Balancing which includes Postgresql, VRA & VRO.

   

   

vRealize Automation Install - Distributed Deployment:

   

My Lab vRA Distributed Deployment is little bit different from the recommended deployment because of the resource crunch in the cluster.

Following is the choice of Distributed Server Sizing

   

Role	Server Name	LB Endpoint
vRA Appliance	vra01.automations.local vra02.automatons.local	vralb.automations.local
IaaS Node	Iaas01.automations.local	Iaaslb.automations.local

   

Few of the basic Requirement which should be considered.

   

• Even if the Load balancers are configured with the nodes attached (if you have one, I had it created beforehand), do not configure any Monitors.
• Do not open the wizard on any of the other nodes other than Node 1.
• Do not browse the Node via Load Balancer URL, always try to browse using the Node 1 direct URL.
• Do not install any Windows components of the IaaS node, this is being taken care by Pre-requisite checker.

Procedure

• Choose the Deployment method

         

• Install the Management Agent on the IaaS Node and make sure that they are on the same NTP server. I used Vmware NTP Server "0.vmware.pool.org" but you can choose whichever you want to.

      

• Here add the Second node of the vRA Appliance with the root Username and password supplied.

      

• Accept the Certificate which is prompted to create trust between both nodes.

     

• VMware has provided the very descriptive explanation of the each role which can be applied to the different IaaS server in the distributed deployment, however in my case I am not using more than one node of IaaS, so I will assign all roles to the same server.   

      

• Run the Prerequisite checker. Choose to Run 'Fix' which will find the dependencies and install & configure them for you within sometime.

            

• I choose to run 'Fix' which will fix everything for me and make IaaS server workable as per recommendations.

 

• Walah!!!! Everything is alset!!! Ready to deploy the content to the server.

      

   

• Since this is distrusted deployment (as we all know by now), do not put the FQDN of the node, rather, enter the Load Balanced FQDN which is created earlier.

 

     

• Enter the IaaS Load Balancer URL which was created earlier.

   

• Provide the SQL server FQDN and the database which you want to create while deployment. I am using Microsoft SQL Server 2014 ADV Express Edition.

      

  

• Provide the Web Role Details

   

   

• Provide Manager Service Role Detail, You may choose to have different server for this role.

   

    

• Provide DEM details, Keep in mind, DEM Orchestrator by default is being installed along the Model Manager role. So below is the details required for the DEM Worker. You can choose to deploy multiple DEM Workers.

    

   

• Provide the Agent Detail, in my case, I am deploying vSphere agent.

      

      

• Generate or import the SHA2 certificate for the Appliance.

   

   

• Generate the Certificate for the Web Certificate

   

• Apply the Same Web Certificate for Manager Service.

     

   

• Summary for the How the Load Balancers should be configured as this point.

   

   

• Run the Validate, which will run the validation on all IaaS configuration provided during previous steps.

   

   

• Validation Executing!!!

   

   

• And ALL GREEN, we are all set to proceed with the installation.

   

   

• Wait!!!! You need to take Snapshots for all the components, if in case the installation fails, you can easily revert to the snapshot and fix the issue and re-execute it.

   

   

• Ready to Hit the Install Button.

   

   

• Installation takes some time to complete which depends your deployment architecture.

   

   

• Installation goes onnnnn…..

   

   

   

    

Will on IT: vCAC Velocity Templates

Will on IT: vCAC Velocity Templates: In vCAC 6.0.1, VMware changed the way email notifications were created. The old way found in the vCAC 6.x documentation of editing the XSLT ...

vCloud Automation Center 6.0 : Connect using SSH for Linux VMs

• Add Action for Entitlement for Machine Action

• Follow link to enable 'Custom Property' in blueprint Add Custom Property

• required tovision VM from the edited Blueprint.

  In this case i am provisioning VM in Amazon EC2 a Linux VM. In case you are not connecting to Amazon EC2 ,you will not be required to download certificate.  Can directly connect with SSH handler.

•  Add Extension to the Firefox browser from Extension page

  

• Search for 'SSH handler' in search box and click install on 'fireSSH' 

• Once added, Re-start the Firefox browser, and now we are ready to launch SSH sessions in browser.
•  Launch a VM instance from the recently edited Blueprint

• 
  
• Click on Action, then 'Export Certificate'

•   Once Export the Certificate , Save it to safe location to refer it for future
• Now you are ready to establish connection from same window to Linux VM
• click on 'Connect Using SSH' button to initiate the SSH connection

•  Another Window will pop-out with connection to Linux VM

•  Provide User name (default for every VM is 'ec2-user')
• click 'browse' and navigate to location where you saved certificate file and select it

•  Once selected click 'Ok' to start connection establishment

•  and Walah!!!!! you are connected to the Linux VM

[virtualjad.com]: vCAC Property Dictionary: Customize Service Reques...

[virtualjad.com]: vCAC Property Dictionary: Customize Service Reques...: In a previous post I discussed the benefits of utilizing vCloud Automation Center's Property Dictionary to add input options during the...

vcloud Suite 5.5 : What`s New included

• VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 will enable customers to design any custom IT service in minutes (such as Hadoop-as-a-Service) to complement current out-of-the-box service capabilities for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings. Further extending its multi-platform and multi-cloud capabilities, VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 will also introduce support for VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware NSX and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack-based cloud environments.

• VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 will enable IT organizations to standardize on a single operations management platform designed to enable higher quality of service, operational efficiency, control and compliance across all applications and services in virtual, physical and cloud environments. The new release will also offer enhanced performance analytics for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server, introduce analytics for a broad range of storage vendors and devices and provide deeper visibility into applications running on Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon Web Services.

• VMware IT Business Management Suite includes new and enhanced editions. The new 1.0 Standard edition allows infrastructure and business stakeholders to quickly understand the cost and consumption of virtual infrastructures across private and public cloud environments. The 8.0 Advanced and Enterprise editions will introduce additional persona-based dashboards tailored to the unique needs of the CIO, CFO of IT, IT project managers and line-of-business owners. This latest release also features native integration with VMware IT Benchmarking, allowing enterprises to continuously compare the cost of their services against industry peers and companies with similar operational characteristics, including public cloud providers.

• VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5 delivers real-time insights and monitoring of data from applications, virtualized infrastructure and physical hardware to help improve operational efficiency and minimize cost and troubleshooting time. New capabilities will ease adoption of the solution in enterprise environments and enable rapid time-to-value. Optimized for VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5 will also simplify the use of content packs developed by partners, allowing for increased visibility into the logs of infrastructure software and hardware commonly found in virtualized and cloud environments.