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.