I have been working with vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) turned vRealize Automation (vRA) product from VMware of late, in order to deploy automation and orchestration capabilities to a number of clients. vRA is a powerful Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) and a Platform As A Service (PaaS) tool from VMware but is pretty complicated in nature.
Starting to work with vRA , one of the main problems I had initially was that there appear to be a lack of sufficiently detailed instructions within the official product documentation set, to fully understand its capabilities and how exactly to implement it in the field properly, in an orderly way. Since vRA on its own is pretty useless and a typical deployment of vRA requires a number of other components such as vSphere, vRealize Orchestrator (vCO) and even NSX, I have not found clearly documented guidelines from VMware, outlining how to deploy all of these, in the exact order they should be deployed. Furthermore, the extensibility features (through proper integration of these components) were not very well (or clearly) documented either from what I could see.
As such, over the course of next few weeks, I’d aim to be putting together a series of articles outlining key steps involved in doing a field deployment of vRA, in the order they should be done that I’m hoping can be used as high level guidance during field deployments, mainly for my own future benefit, if not for the sake of others out there. Note that these will not be focused too much on a fully distributed deployment of all components involved but would simply be focused more on the integration of each component & the sensible order they should be deployed and integrated. All the contents here would be based on the latest versions available as of now (The latest version of vRA, version 6.2.1 was released last month). But most points covered would be equally valid on the whole of vRA / vCAC 6.x product platform as they all have a common product base.
Product versions used for these articles are as follows
- vRA 6.2.1 (latest as of 31.03.2015)
- vRO 6.0.1 (latest as of 31.03.2015)
- NSX 6.1.3 (latest as of 31.03.2015)
- vSphere 5.5
Feel free to post comments based on your experience…etc.
- VMware vRealize Automation part 1 – Support Matrix
- VMware vRealize Automation part 2 – Deployment Architecture – Management Cluster
- VMware vRealize Automation part 3 – Appliance Deployment
- VMware vRealize Automation part 4 – IaaS Server Component Deployment
- VMware vRealize Automation part 5 – Deployment & Configuration & Integration
- VMware vRealize Automation Part 6 – System / Infrastructure & Fabric Administrators
- VMware vRealize Automation Part 7 – Tenant Administrator & Basic Blueprints
- (Optional Fix) – How to address missing Catalog / Entitlement Actions
- VMware vRealize Automation Part 8 (optional) – Adding a VMware vCloud Air Endpoint & Publishing a Cloud VM Blueprint
- VMware vRealize Automation Part 9 – Extensibility – Custom Properties & Build Profiles & Property Dictionary
- VMware vRealize Automation Part 10 – IaaS Extensibility – Using vRO for Blueprint Customization
- VMware vRealize Automation Part 11 – XaaS Extensibility – Using vRO for creating and publishing Advanced Service Blueprints
- VMware vRealize Automation Part 12 – TBC
Cheers
Chan