Setup the vRealize Automation prerequisites for IaaS

When you’re setting up your vRealize Automation environment, you start of easy with the vRealize Automation appliance. After this you’re probably thinking it will be ‘a peace of cake‘, ‘a walk in the park‘ or any other metafor that’s harder to remember than the vRA appliance setup procedure.

But unfortunately this festive mood is short lived. Next up is the installation and configuration of the vRealize Automation IaaS server. This starts easy by requesting some simple input variables such as usernames, database servers, default tenants, certificates, etc. but than you hit the Installation Prerequisite Checker.

The challenge is to setup all the vRealize Automation prerequisites and end up with all green checkboxes. To achieve this you need to install the correct Microsoft IIS and .NET components, the correct Java version, setup the firewall, configure the Microsoft Transaction Coordinator, set the correct user right in MS IIS, configure System variables, etc. All in all, a long and frustrating procedure downloading the correct versions, adding the correct Windows components rebooting the server multiple times, etc, etc.

Luckily Brian Graf created a great PowerCLI script which does this all for you. You just need a (virtual) server, Brian’s script an dan Internet connection (which I didn’t have in my last POC environment, forcing me to do the manual setup again :-( ).

This PowerCLI script currently works with Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012, and 2012 R2.

You can download the latest version of the vCAC 6.2 Prerequisites PowerCLI script on GitHub.