vRA7 Distributed Deployment Guide

Enterprise (Distributed) Deployment

An administrator can deploy and install multiple instances of the vRealize Automation appliance and IaaS components for scale, redundancy, high availability, and disaster recovery. In a typical architecture, the IaaS components are distributed over multiple machines. For high availability deployments, load balancers distribute the workload across the computing environment. System administrators configure load balancers outside of the vRealize Automation framework.

There are certain changes made in vRealize Automation 7 compared to previous version. I have just mentioned few of them in short below for reference.

a. Embedded instance of VMware Identity Manager known as Directories Management within vRealize Automation handles the Authentication. There is no longer a  requirement to deploy an Identity Appliance, vCenter SSO or Platform Services controller.

b. The appliance database is now clustered automatically within the appliance. There is no longer any need for an external database load balancer or DNS entry. 

c. vRealize Application Services functionality has been merged into vRealize Automation. The vRealize Application Services appliance no longer exists.

d. Unified Service Blueprint and Design Canvas

e. Wizard based deployment.

This diagram below shows the components of Enterprise deployment.

Lets take a look at the requirements depending of the type of deployment you are planning, you can find more information on this in for truly a Production deployment,

vRealize-Automation-70-Reference-Architecture

Pre-Installation

1. Components needed:

2 x vRealize Automation Virtual Appliances.

2 x Web servers.

2 x Manager servers.

2 x DEM servers.

2 x Agent servers.

2 x vRealize Orchestrator servers.

2. Load Balancer setup for: 

vRA7 App

IaaS Web

Iaas Manager

3. Certificates (*.key and *.pem) generated as below,

vRealize Automation where CN or SAN contain below information,

• vRA Load Balancer fqdn.
• vRA1 appliance fqdn.
• vRA2 appliance fqdn.

IaaS Web server where CN or SAN contain below information,

• IaaS Web Load Balancer fqdn.
• IaaS Web1 fqdn.
• IaaS Web2 fqdn.

IaaS Manager server where CN or SAN contain below information,

• IaaS Manager Load Balancer fqdn.
• IaaS Manager1 fqdn.
• IaaS Manager2 fqdn.

vRealize Orchestrator server where CN or SAN contain below information,

• vRO Load Balancer fqdn.
• vRO1 fqdn.
• vRO2 fqdn.

4. DNS entries created for both forward and reverse lookup. Initially the vRealize Load balancer DNS entries will point to vRA1, Web1, Manager1 IPs. Once the deployment is complete then it will be changed to LB.

5. A working Database server and its connectivity to vRealize servers.

6. Monitors in LB should be disabled for the deployment. Once the deployment is fully complete, they will be enabled back on.

Installation

1. vRA7 Enterprise Installation

2. vRA7 Management Agent installation

Post Installation

3. vRA7 Tenant Setup
4. vRA7 Directory Setup
5. vRA7 Endpoint Setup and Fabric Setup
6. vRA7 Business Group Setup
7. vRA7 Reservations Setup
8. vRA7 Blueprints
9. vRA7 Service Catalog
10. vRA7 Custom properties for beginners