Tuesday, September 1, 2015

#vmworld How to Drive Intelligent Provisioning and Operation of VMs Using vRealize Automation and Operations

A title written by engineers ;-). VMware’s approach to the Cloud Management Platform “CMP” is an integrated set of tools for managing Private and Public Clouds. This contrasts other CMP solutions which tend to provide a distinct set of tools just for managing 3rd Party clouds. VMware’s approach is to Automate the SDDC at Scale, enable collaboration and self-service as well as delivering continuous remediation and optimization. This presentation focuses on SDDC automation as well as remediation.

vRealize Automation “vRA” management PAK is introduced. It requires vRealize Operations and Automation 6.X or higher and management PAK 1.0. From native vRealize Automation you can see basic information around utilization. You do not however, see true health information. You can see this from vRealize Operations “vROPs” Manager by installing the Pak. Installing the Management PAK enables vRealize Operations to talk to Automation and pull in all the objects. You can now see Automation objects such as business groups, blueprints and tenants from within vRealize Ops.

One useful benefit is seeing the usage patterns for the reservation created in vRA. Several dashboards are provided with the PAK that now appear in the vROPs console including a reservation and tenant view.

There are several things to be aware of when integrating the PAK; you need the sysadmin username and password from vRA as well as a SuperUser account. The SuperUser account is not a native account and needs elevated access to all tenants and fabrics. One of the gotcha’s is ensuring the vRA self-signed certificate is replaced with a a certificate that supports a higher cipher level than TLS 1.0.

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