Welcome back techies. I have picked up this topic for my series of blogs because it has a huge demand in market and slowly all customers are moving to private cloud using this product. VMware vRealize Automation is a modern infrastructure automation platform that enables self-service multicloud environments. With vRealize Automation, customers can increase agility, productivity and efficiency through self-service automation, by reducing the complexity of their IT environment, streamlining IT processes and delivering a DevOps-ready automation platform.
This post focuses on configuration of the vRA 8.1 environment. At the end of this series, you will have clear understanding on configuration of vRA 8.1 environment, and how a user gets a portal to request server’s from the catalog.
I have already explained the deployment procedure of vRA 8.1 in my previous post here.
https://virtualrove.com/2020/06/22/vrlcm-8-1-part1-deployment-configuration/
This vRA 8.1 series is divided into following parts.
VMware vRealize Automation 8.1 – Part1: Cloud Assembly & Service Broker
VMware vRealize Automation 8.1 – Part2: Cloud Accounts,Projects & Cloud Zones
VMware vRealize Automation 8.1 – Part3: Flavor Mapping & Image Mapping
VMware vRealize Automation 8.1 – Part4: Network Profiles
VMware vRealize Automation 8.1 – Part5: Blueprints
VMware vRealize Automation 8.1 – Part6: Content & Catalog
VMware vRealize Automation 8.1 – Part7: User Permissions, Roles & Branding
At this stage, I have 4 ESXi host cluster, a vCenter, vRA & vIDM deployed though vRLCM.
VMware Identity Manager is already integrated with vRA as part of vRLCM deployment procedure. Our Active Directory has already been integrated with vIDM. Check the procedure here.
https://virtualrove.com/2020/07/11/vmware-vrlcm-8-1-part3-identity-manager-ad-integration/
Lets begin the show.
Log into vRA URL with local account.
You get a ‘Cloud Services Console’ upon login.
‘Launch Quickstart’ – To use inbuilt guided setup to configure your vRA env. However, we will use manual setup to understand all components.
Cloud Assembly: vRealize Automation Cloud Assembly is a cloud-based service that you use to create and deploy machines, applications, and services to your cloud infrastructure. The primary purpose of vRealize Automation Cloud Assembly is to create blueprints, and then deploy the blueprints.
Click on ‘Cloud Assembly’.
We will see Deployments, Design & Infrastructure tabs in detail in my upcoming posts.
Service Broker: You provide the blueprints and other templates to your consumers in a catalog. Your consumers can manage their deployments. You can also create and apply policies on this page. Its simplified user interface that cloud administrators make available to users when the administrator’s teams do not need full access to developing and building and the blueprints or templates.
Code Stream: vRealize Automation Code Stream models the tasks in your software release process, and automates the development and test of developer code to release it to production.
vRealize Orchestrator: Anything as a service. You create custom workflows here as per your need and publish them into the catalog. This one is really a big topic and I will try to cover at least one workflow to you an example.
Multitenancy: vRA 8.1 environment can also be configured for multitenancy. In this setup, you assign dedicated infrastructure to a particular tenant. Organizations can choose whether or not to enable tenancy based on their need for the logical isolation provided by multitenancy. I will try my level best to setup the multitenancy and show you an example.
That’s it. This is a small introduction and navigation of vRA 8.1. Its been a while since I worked on vRA. I remember doing implementation of 6.X version long back and little work on 7.X last year. Hence I would explain replaced naming conventions in 8.x version. I have not used any specific documentation to configure the explained environment in my upcoming blogs. I just used my experience on earlier versions and started configuring it. So, please suggest if you want me add anything that is missing and should have been there in the post. Thank you. 😊
We will begin the configuration of the vRA 8.1 environment in my next post.
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