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
vRO
Documenting vRealize Orchestrator Code with JSDoc and Confluence
Recently I’ve been working on improving HobbitCloud’s DevOps practices, specifically around committing code to version control and documenting it. Once a developer checks code in, this should compile, and if successful be deployed to the test environment. Once here it will undergo automated testing before progressing to staging for unit and integration tests. Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Cycling through XML in vRealize Orchestrator
A few months ago a client asked me to create an NSX application load-balancer programmatically, and then make it available to their vRealize Automation consumers in through the self-service catalog. In building-block fashion, they requested that this wasn’t a composite blueprint, but rather through XaaS. While the former would definitely take less time, the latter was not that difficult either once I got started. Continue reading
Configuring a lower lease time for a vRealize Automation deployment
Recently a customer I was working with had the need to ensure that deployments of a certain service category had a lower lease time than others. So all blueprints would have no maximum lease time configured, but if a customer chose a “DevTest” catalog item, then the lease time is set to seven days. Continue reading
Enabling dynamic site selection in the Private Cloud with vRealize Automation
In HobbitCloud we have the ability to deploy vRealize Automation workloads to multiple sites. This enables us to leverage different technologies like NSX for vSphere and NSX-T, without having to mix both in the same site. It also means that if we have to scale up workloads for certain projects, we can utilise different clusters. Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Verifying a variable type in vRealize Orchestrator
Really short post, but this might stop you from going bat**** crazy…
Recently I needed to create some NSX Distributed Firewall Rules in vRealize Orchestrator for a complex micro-segmentation project. The layer 3 section already existed in NSX, I just needed to create the rules on the fly using the REST API. Continue reading
Deploy an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster from vRealize Automation – Part 2: Deploying the cluster
In part 1 of this short series we used vRO to create a bearer token for connecting to Microsoft Azure. Now we will create some new components and a master workflow for provisioning our AKS Cluster, to enable our developers to request public cloud Kubernetes straight from vRealize Automation. Continue reading
Deploy an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster from vRealize Automation – Part 1: Authentication
Kubernetes (k8s) is arguably one of the hottest technologies right now. Whether it’s building your own in the private cloud, leveraging vendor implementations to compliment your enterprise apps or consuming public cloud varieties like Amazon Web Service’s EKS – there’s no shortage of ways to deploy k8s.
Capture the Business Group at request time in vRealize Automation
A few days ago I had the strange need to capture a requester’s business group in a custom property whilst provisioning resources in vRealize Automation.
Whilst obtaining this information post-provisoning is simple enough, I couldn’t find an obvious way to do this at first. Then I sat down and thought about it. Continue reading
