Proud Speaker at VMware Explore

Recently I was fortunate enough to participate as a speaker in the VMware's prestigious forum VMware Explore 2023 (formerly VMworld). I presented a session along with my colleague Suresh T.

The session was about how customers can migrate large amount of workloads conveniently with careful planning and minimum impact to production workload.

It was a exciting to meet lot of known faces from the company and customers.

VCF on vCloud Director

This is however not a new topic and not the first time. Writing this for the people who have the vCloud Director based lab environments. I was talking to someone in my team on this and thought of doing this myself and share the experience through this blog. I will walk-through on how VCF can be deployed in the nested environment on a vAPP in the vCloud Director based environment.

Lets take a look at the diagram first and see what are we trying to do here,

 

As you can see above, we would have a vSphere environment with all components setup and on top of that there is a vCloud Director based infrastructure on which Users will create vAPPs consisting of VMs.

 

VCF 4.1 What's new?

 VCF 4.1 What's new?

Recently VMware released 4.1 VCF lets take a look what all new things were added (source: vmware.com)

The list is big and can be checked on the vmware VCF release notes site. I have just picked the ones I think are most commonly used and helpful in this release.

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Remote Clusters ROBO

VCF extends its capabilities to the ROBO and Edge sites with Remote Clusters. Now customers can enjoy the same consistent cloud operations in their core data center and edge/ ROBO sites.

ESXi Parallel Upgrade

Parallel upgrades reduce the overall time required to upgrade your environment. This enables the customer to update the ESXi software on multiple clusters in the management domain or a workload domain in parallel.

vRA Integration with Microsoft Azure

There are lot of articles and information already available around this topic. But I thought will do this myself in my way.

In this blog I will talk about deploy/manage Azure workload from vRealize automation Portal. This is not a very often seen used case in any organization but definitely something good to learn. I used MS Azure Public Cloud and vRA 7.3 for this blog. Similar thing can be achieved using Azure Stack as well, but I am yet to explore that option. vRA 7.2 is also fully supported for this.

OOTB Infoblox IPAM with vRA 7.1 - Setup Guide

Since this is an Integration part so my assumption is that you have fair amount of experience with Infoblox IPAM NIOS appliance and vRealize Automation. Here I am going to use the recent release of vRealize Automation version 7.1 in this blog.

vRA7 Blueprints

Setting up Blueprints is little different here as compared to earlier version of vRealize Automation. The blueprints are setup under the 'Design' tab.

Procedure

1. Select Design > Blueprints. Click the New icon (+). Fill in the required information in General settings.

vRA7 Reservations Setup

Network Profile

Network profiles are created to specify network settings in reservations. You can also specify a network profile in the  blueprints. An external network profile is created for the reservations and blueprints. When the VM is destroyed the IP is released back to the pool.

Note: If a network profile is specified in the blueprint by using the "VirtualMAchine.NetworkN.ProfileName" custom property and by a reservation that is used by the blueprint, the network profile specified in the blueprint takes precedence.

vRA7 Business Group Setup

Business groups are used to associate a set of services and resources to a set of users, often corresponding to a line of business, department, or other organizational unit. You create a business group so that you can configure reservations and entitle users to provision service catalog items for the business group members.

vRA7 Endpoint Setup and Fabric Setup

IaaS and Fabric administrators configure the resources for the existing infrastructure to work with vRealize Automation and allocates the infrastructure resources to vRealize Automation business groups.

The diagram shows the flow of things happening from the administrators side.

vRA7 Adding Directory Services

1. Login with the Local account you created. Select Administration > Directories Management > Directories.

vRA7 Tenant Setup

1. Once the installation is complete, open the vRA URL using the VIP or first node of vRA appliance. You should see the page below.

vRA7 Enterprise Installation

Enterprise deployments are typically used for production environment. You can design your enterprise deployment as per your needs. An enterprise deployment can consist of distributed components or high-availability deployments configured with load balancers. Enterprise deployments are designed for more complex installation structures with distributed and redundant components and generally include load balancers.

Note: For load-balanced deployments, multiple active Web server instances and vRealize Automation appliance appliances cause the installation to fail. Only a single Web server instance and a single vRealize Automation appliance should be active during the installation.

vRA7 Management Agent Deployment

You can downloads and installs a Management Agent on IaaS machines in your deployment. The Management Agent must be installed on all IaaS servers except for those that are used exclusively for your MS SQL database. The Management Agent registers IaaS nodes with the vRealize Automation appliance, automates the installation and management of IaaS components, and collects support and telemetry information. The Management Agent runs as a Windows service on your IaaS machine and you must have local administrator rights to install the agent.

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.

Part 5. Import external application to AppD

1. Login to the AppD server using the darwin_user account or the one has sufficient permissions,

a. Once logged in Login run to launch the Darwin CLI,

Part 4. Prepare the VM template for Cloud provisioning - Linux

1. Agent files and Location (on AppDirector).

Copy the necessary agents files depending on the OS and architecture to the VM template /tmp folder. You can use SCP/WGET/WinSCP anything.

vRA Guest (gugent) deploy on Windows VM template

1. Login to the Windows template server where you want to deploy the vRA agent. Open the vRA appliance webpage and click on the IaaS Install tab.

Click and download the desired version x32 or x64 of Windows agent under 'Provisioning Utilities'. 

Part 3. Add templates to Cloud Provider and map it with Logical template

1. Login to AppD page and Click on 'Cloud Provider' from drop down menu.

Part 2. Create Cloud Provider in AppD

vCloud Application Director registers a cloud provider by connecting to a vCloud Automation Center provisioning or business group. Verify that your user account has the ROLE_CLOUD_ADMIN cloud administrator role assigned to it in vRA.

VMware vRA Application Director Basic Guide

Pre-requisites and Assumptions