When adding extensibility to your vRealize Automation platform, it’s important to get the basics right first. All too often it’s tempting to rush off and build complex blueprints whilst forgetting about the building blocks of good infrastructure, like naming and IPAM. Here I’m going to demonstrate how I do custom naming for workloads in my environment. Continue reading
vReailze Automation
Don’t forget about DTC when migrating your vRealize Automation IaaS database
HobbitCloud has been enjoying somewhat of an infrastructure refresh recently, with the entire estate being renamed and Windows Servers migrating to 2016 and 2019. Part of this project was to increase resilience in my on-premise data warehouse by implementing a Microsoft SQL Server 2016 AlwaysOn Availability Group (AAG) running on Windows Server Core. Continue reading
Moving vRealize Automation blueprints between environments with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2
When large enterprises deploy a cloud management platform like VMware vRealize Automation, they often have a number of different environments. To ensure best practices, blueprints and orchestration scripts are created in development before being tested in another environment, before finally being transported into Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Stop failed vRealize Automation software deployments from auto-deleting
This will quite possibly be the shortest, but yet most useful, posts on vRealize Automation you’ve ever read…
If you regularly develop software components for vRA, you’ve undoubtedly discovered that if for some reason a deployment fails, the machine is automatically deleted within a couple of minutes. This is frustrating as it gives you no time to debug why it failed, as all evidence is deleted with the machine.
Thankfully, Sam McGeown shared the answer a couple of weeks back:
So there you have it. One custom property attached to your blueprint will enable you to see why your deployment failed.
This is one of those things I wished I’da known ages ago!
Wednesday Tidbit: Make sure your vRA directory attributes are correct
Earlier this week I had an issue in vRealize Automation where logged-on usernames were being displayed incorrectly. At first I hoped it was just a cosmetic issue, but as I delved deeper it appeared to be a little more than that, and could be an issue for both users and developers.
Securing VMware applications with Google Authenticator
Earlier this week I created a tenant in HobbitCloud for a friend with his own development company. He needs to leverage the power of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, but is unwilling to move to the public cloud for all his workloads just yet. However, now that HobbitCloud is accessible externally, it was clear I had to increase security. Continue reading
